At the time, I hated using these things. Mac OS 9 would lock up unexpectedly (generally Windows wouldn't blue screen while simply typing up a document whereas these iMacs would just freeze, requiring you to stick a paperclip into a hole like ejecting a CD drive manually). The keyboard was terrible, mouse was worse and the speakers were only good to play notification dings.
This author of the article has some real rose-tinted glasses.
It was such an iconic machine. Ironically, at the time I hated them. (I probably still wouldn't want to use one even now, but now I only have to look at pictures of them, and they admittedly are nice to look at.)
I had a friend in high school whose family had one of these in their living room, and it was running OS 9. It was practically useless, but I forget what he did on it. I seem to remember that it ran World of Warcraft, but now I'm questioning my memory if that was really possible or not.
His family also got the first iMac running OS X, and that was such a beauty to behold. I mean, maybe the design wasn't as colorful or iconic as the G4 generation, but man that OS was sweet.