I guess beauty is in the eye of the beholder. When the iMac came out, my opinion was the same as yours -- absolutely beautiful design. Unfortunately, everyone copied the look (often quite badly), and now the original iMac looks tacky and dated to me.
It’s a nice design but the original iMac broke new ground. Personally I didn’t like it at the time, it drew too much attention to its plasticiness for my taste.
Whereas something like a Silicon Graphics workstation looked out of this world cool.
The first iMac that got me excited was the Sunflower.
