(Also, was the x86 emulation implemented in-house? I wouldn’t be surprised if some niche small company had a x86 emulator for PPC product that they could be paid to port.)
The Workplace OS would also have been used on Apple hardware as part of the abortive Taligent project.
(It also would have been used on x86 and other platforms, but they started with PPC)
When OS/2 for PowerPC was set in motion, that Intel would “Make CISC Great Again” with the Pentium was far from clear.
Pentium shook that tree a bit, and Pentium II really razzle-dazzled it.
The Pentium introduced the idea of micro op codes though the Pentium Pro was the first chip to really run with it. The CISC x86 instructions were converted into simpler instructions internally. These micro op codes could be pipe-lined, executed in parallel, and executed out-of-order.
If the Pentium II really razzle-dazzled, it did it with RISC architecture at its core. The CISC instruction decoder added a bit of die size but that did not matter much and Intel had leading-edge manufacturing tech.
The internal parallelism was also put to good use by adding SIMD instructions (MMX). These first appeared in the Pentium MMX and Pentium II but the Pentium III did it much better and of course Intel has continued to add more powerful SIMD stuff over time.
RISC did not win only inside Intel chips of course. Every successful ISA since the 90's has been RISC including ARM and RISC-V. But even RISC chips feature some complex instructions these days.