It was awesome in the sense that it was a really, really good solution to the problem they had when the 8086 was being designed:

  * we want to stay 16-bit
  * we want to make porting extremely easy
  * we want to make gradual upgrading of people's programs to >64K easy
  * we want to work well with really small memories (so don't force people to use fat pointers all the time)
  * we don't want the typical (or max non-redundant) instruction to get too long
  * we don't want an MMU
  * we don't want complicated bank switching
  * we don't want long carry chains for all address generations
  * -- but we still want a gigantic address space (for the time it was designed)!