It's kind of mind blowing that our cheap peripherals are driven by what used to be top-of-the-line processors only a few decades ago. I guess all that firmware has to run on something.
As I mentioned in another comment, already the ca. 1987 Amiga 2000 in this article had a 6502 compatible core on the keyboard controller, and some same era hd controllers had Z80's on them - they were cheap already then.
