I work in an IBM i shop and concur that it is a powerful and elegant machine. All the old hats who've worked on it for most of their life, at least in my experience, still refer to it as the AS/400, rather than referring to it as the IBM i (before it was called IBM i, it was called System i).

Despite this, I can confirm that many of our non-tech savvy users and managers think of the machine as old and antiquated simply because of the way most of our user-base interfaces with the machine (TN5250 connection - green screen). I kid you not, many of the managers think we'd be better off replacing our IBM i with a new out-of-the-box machine, despite the fact that we have decades of homegrown programs and processes that have been built and customized on the i.