Yup. These days the move to the 80386 is associated with the shift to virtual memory, paging, process isolation, etc. But in 1985, for most customers, all of these features were secondary considerations. (The mainstream PC operating systems would not exploit them for half a decade or more.)
The killer feature was the flat 32-bit addressing. Data structures could be more than 64 KB without special (complicated and slow) handling. Large programs didn't have to be unnaturally segmented. A pressing issue at the time, when a typical full-screen colour bitmap was larger than 64 KB, and GUIs were becoming prominent.
I didn't think the 8086 programming model was that bad. There were several different memory models for compiled languages and I think it was outright fun to work with the segment registers in assembly language.
It was tragic though that no "Multitasking DOS" emerged in the 1980s. My 1987 AT clone was more powerful than the largest PDP-11 but the big PDP-11 could support 32+ terminals. It was annoying as hell that I couldn't download files from a BBS while doing something else -- I tried to make a TSR that did that but couldn't make it work.
There was and it ran on quite well on 286 systems. It started out as Concurrent CP/M-86 but evolved into Concurrent DOS. It was able to run simple MSDOS programs and eventually ran from a FAT filesystem. This OS came from Digital Research. The wikipedia page has a lot more info. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiuser_DOS.
The killer feature was the flat 32-bit addressing. Data structures could be more than 64 KB without special (complicated and slow) handling. Large programs didn't have to be unnaturally segmented. A pressing issue at the time, when a typical full-screen colour bitmap was larger than 64 KB, and GUIs were becoming prominent.