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People had no trouble word processing on CGA 640x200 15Khz. For most MS/DOS apps, this remained the standard through the mid-80s -- even if you had an EGA card, most of your software worked in 80x25 640x200 CGA textmode. The Amiga definitely was not as good at this in 16 colors, especially if you had no fast RAM, but you could switch to monochrome or 4 colors and get nice performance.
The interlace argument though is false because of this. Most MS-DOS software was written to work in a 15Khz non-interlaced mode (even if it was run on a system that automatically switched it to a 31Khz textmode).
The "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM." was the real reason, as someone mentioned. It was NOT a cult though, it was simple business politics. When you are in middle management at a company, and you try to do something innovative, you get punished when something goes wrong. You do not get punished if you do what everyone else is doing and something fails, then it's either attributed to bad luck or a mistake by your suppliers.
In the IT departments of most major companies, the vendor they went to for computing was IBM. If you bought from IBM and something went wrong, you wouldn't be blamed for it. If you bought from Commodore and something went wrong, you'd be blamed for anything you did out of the norm. It's just how companies work. This doesn't go just for computers, it goes for any business process. Anytime you introduce change you are putting your career on the line. Success *might* lead to career advancement, but if it's in something like computers that upper management doesn't understand, they might not even notice. Keeping your job safe takes priority.
None of this applies to home computers, which is why Commodore was able to have such a huge presence in the home computer market. The difference is that the home computer era in the US ended sooner than it did in Europe. Once IBM-compatible clones dropped in price, there was more of an incentive to "take them home for work", and more of an incentive for people to write home software for them that might also be used at the office since the installed base was so large.
Since Americans had more disposable income, that price was starting to be reached around the time the Amiga was coming to market, particularly with Tandy's relatively affordable line of PCjr clones. By 1989 or so the home computer market was lost in the US, not because the IBM clones were better on a price/performance basis, but because of software availability. Back then I could still show people "Shadow of the Beast" and people would gasp and say "Your computer can do THAT!?", meanwhile there'd be no place you could actually BUY Shadow of the Beast for a hundred miles.
The price/performance gap being closed and exceeded was what caused the fall of home computers in Europe. This was driven entirely by the huge market share in the US allowing for incredible amounts of R&D that no one company could match.
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