What made them special was the service. I knew several people that worked there when they were the king of the hill. When I started grad school at Texas A&M, Gateway was the sole supplier of computers, in spite of the fact that they were a state school just down the road from Dell. According to my friends that worked there, Gateway decided service was too expensive, so they killed off the single reason they were popular. (The move may have been forced by the market, but it nonetheless eliminated the reason anyone had to buy Gateway.) I tried to buy a Gateway in 2002 and there was no way to get it delivered, so I bought a Compaq at Best Buy.

An interesting side note. North Dakota's current governor also started a billion-dollar tech company, in Fargo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doug_Burgum