> AmigaOS was dead. MorphOS came to take its heritage and put it to a new level.
> Things looked promising. Then OS4 was announced with toatlly unrealistic promises.
> Users were distracted from MorphOS and the market was split into pieces.

I think the distraction started even earlier. The public announcement of MorphOS was followed by the announcement of the Amiga sale from Gateway to Amino just one week later. With that came all this AMIE/AmigaDE nonsense (obviously bearing the official name), which was always overshadowing any serious "Amiga"-like OS projects of that time, including MorphOS, also with hardware-related and purposely misleading things like these:

"Further he introduced Dean Brown (DKB) as Director of Hardware once more. Mr. Brown would be responsible for creating referenz hardware for interessted third-party developers to look about. A game handheld device would allready be finished, which was in use by Amiga internally to impress interessted parties with the features of the new operating environment. [...] it was finished after one week of development! [...] And then Bill McEwen had a very special goody to offer: Once the single parts of the operating environment will be put together there will be the AmigaOne - a new multimedia desktop, developed and designed by Amiga, even if manufactured by thir-party manufacturers."
http://www.amiga-news.de/en/news/AN-2000-06-00088-EN.html

"if there’s going to be an Amiga computer again, there must be hardware specs-rules about what it will be and what it will contain. Therefore, someone must define those specs. Ideally (at least in the Amiga realm), it’s someone with the knowledge, experience and vision to carry it off while keeping true to the philosophy that made the original experience so wonderful. [...] “First and foremost, my job is to create the test platforms that will be used by the internal software teams,” Brown explains. This will result (initially) in systems that look very similar to existing computers. “These same platforms, or modifications of them, will be made available to our hardware partners as reference designs. In the medium term, I expect to develop a new architecture that addresses many of the issues that plague current computer systems. Issues that in inflexible operating systems cannot be fixed,” says Brown. [...] “Shortly after we release our first real hardware that’s natively running the new operating system, there will be another machine that is hardware incompatible with it running the same OS.”"
http://web.archive.org/web/20050218095140/http://www.amiga.com/press/zine/8-1-00/Dean_Brown/

Back then (this was even months before the Zico "spec"), most active Amiga users still longed for custom "Amiga" hardware, and it was only later that Amino/AIW touted themselves as a pure software company who would leave hardware development to 3rd parties. Even in mid-2000 when the first public MorphOS beta was released, McEwen and Fleecy's pipe dreams were still taken at face value by most active users. When the users became increasingly discontent with AIW's vision, eventually starting to realize that the future Amiga was to be mostly a handheld device running full-fledged Linux with Tao's Intent multimedia layer as an application on top, and the OS4 project (then to be led by AIW) was thus announced in early 2001, the distraction was already in full effect.

Bottom line: MorphOS didn't bear the "Amiga" name and thus wasn't considered by most Amiga users even before OS4 was announced. Sad but true.