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Apple had always maintained (and publicly released!) Darwin on x86 dating back to OPENSTEP and the Rhapsody DRs, but much of the “Mac OS X” frameworks and pieces on top were definitely not running on x86 without more work. Think Carbon, QuickDraw, etc. Pieces critical to running the Finder and most 3rd party apps.

ISTR blog posts by an Apple engineer describing how little of the graphical system actually worked (basically just WindowServer and small Cocoa apps) without a lot more work to fix endian issues

This is absolutely not true. JK and Kim Schienberg are personal friends and can attest to the veracity of this story through other channels. https://qr.ae/TUfeNI

I seem to recall Steve Jobs himself saying this at WWDC, so are you saying that he was lying during the presentation?

Further to this, I recall Darwin (the BSDish system running under OS X) x86 images being available to download from Apple up until Intel Mac's became available.