Your parents were wrong. Assuming you wanted to play games as well as run productivity software, the C128 was far superior to any PC in 1985. Yes the PC would eventually catch up in the 90s, but the C128 was discontinued by then.
In 1988, I had saved up for an Amiga, but my father offered to match what I had saved for a hard drive if I bought a PC instead.
The PC was 15x as expensive as the C128 and still wasn’t any good for gaming. While C128 had the entire C64 games library available!
It also had the CP/M software library and could run productivity software in 80 columns. Yes CP/M software wasn’t as good as DOS software, yes your spreadsheets didn’t calculate as quickly, but for a couple of years the C128 was the best option, until the Amiga came along.
The Amiga was certainly the best option in 1988. Arguably it was the best until about 1995.
BASIC was actually slower on the original PC than on the 6502 and the Z80.
It wasn't long before I admitted how correct they were.
I believe the out of the store price was something like $2,300. With a model below that available for under $2,000, I think with less ram or only one floppy or something. But anyway this was for a fairly atypical take on the PC and a regular white box of the same era could have been had for perhaps half of that with the same or better specs.
That said, I was a kid, so I don't really remember the numbers well.
We were definitely not rich.