x86 is a hack on top of a chip design that was originally intended as a low-cost calculator CPU that gradually grew up to power big-iron servers. Most of its competitors were designed for medium or large computers from the get-go, so had far less backward-compatibility baggage to deal with.
Not at all, the original 16bit x86 was well designed. The 32bit extensions were pretty decent too. Its not until much later that it really started to turn to shit. The real disaster started when Intel started haphazardly adding terribly thought out SIMD instructions. AMD64 truly sucks though, this is where the original encoding should have been replaced.
