"By 1982 this was the most 'BASIC' model you could get..." Of course, that's why it had _extended_ BASIC! "Extended" would certainly be more, wouldn't it? 😛 Nice pun!
"You could do fun things like creat[ing] operating systems! And the first real operating system to appear for the Color Computer, of course, was FLEX." Um, no, the first one was the OS that came built into the computer. We had to have been able to use it without home-level cross-dev. before the disk drives were ever available for it. You're not telling me that you had to find a machine to write an OS on and then port to the Tandy so it could even runt at all, before this disk system, are you?