No, that definitely doesn't agree with what Barry told me directly in a phone conversation.
He wasn't interested in direct development of AROS and after examining the state of the OS he didn't consider it polisedh or stable enough for inclusion with his PCs.
And the MorphOS developers had apparently rejected an X86 port (for at least the immediately future).
So he turned to a Linux Distro (which he's now getting gaffs for).

I'm not sure how I feel about C=USA, but it doesn't seem fair that other small shops can sell AROS based systems and not get any negative press but when C=USA wants to bundle an open source OS with their machines they get flack for it.