Yep, the STs GEM desktop OS is horrible on the ST. I was used to the Acorn Arch's Risc OS before getting my original Atari STFM back in 1987 and the first time I used GEM it felt very limited compared to the Arch.

As mentioned by an ST fan elsewhere on the forum, the ST's OS has come along since then. The official GEM OS never really got that much better other than adding support for more drives, coloured folders etc. It was after market homebrew development that eventually brought multitasking OSs and different Desktop environments to the ST. However this are not official, and it is a bit like running Linux, or something else on an Amiga. It's still not the actual system's OS. Which in the ST's case wasn't good.

Did you know that GEM OS was actually a PC OS that run on top of DOS? It was selected by Atari for the ST at the last moment as they didn't have an OS for it.

As for the sound. Yes it was 3 channel mono on the original STFM. However it could do more than the Sprectrum. You could play samples easily for example. And it had great sound for chip tunes. These tend to spund clearer and crisper than chip tunes on the Amiga due to the Amiga's sound being more suited to sampled sound playback. However the sound isn't any match for the Amiga. (ST fans always like to point out the MIDI ports, but lets face it. These are ports to control external expensive music equipment to make music, and these capacities are not standard without the extra hardware plugged in).

The STE did make a big improvement, but it was clear Atari would finally trying to improve the ST to make it level with the Amiga. 4 channel stereo sound, and simm sockets for up to 4 meg of ran on the motherboard. Plus an upgrade to the custom chipset with a built in blitter. But the STE was too little, too late. The STFM already had the majority share so games had to continue to be developed for both, so STE sound and other advantages were never taken advantage of as much as they should have been.