Actually it was more Apple picking up Steve, which ended up leading to an inverted buy from inside.
BeOS was quite interesting too. Though it lacked multi-user support, and had a small user community. Its BeFS filesytem had an indexing feature that dwarfs all desktop search features even today - and Windows "Cairo" (1996) / WinFS (2006) that tried to accomplish it too, turned out as vamporeware.
Both NeXTSTEP and BeOS were ahead with multimedia support like real time video player and WYSIWYG editor.