A poor move at the time, but in retrospect, it panned out. The original 25 and 33 mhz SX's had a present but disabled FPU, and they cost Intel more to produce than the 486DX. But it had the upside of making 'wimpy' processors acceptable to the public -- without which the Celeron and even the DragonBall would not have seen the popularity they have.
The other positive side effect of 'underpowered' processors becoming 'OK' was that it opened the door for later Processor manufacturers, notably AMD and Cyrix, to make their own FPU-less processors for low power applications and embedded tools. Now-a-days (end of the Year 2000) you can pick up an AMD Elan 400, which is a low-low-low power 486/66 SX for less then 15 USD each (in lots of one thousand).
Unlike the SX convention with Intel's 386SX, which had a 32-bit internal path but 16-bit external path, the 486SX was 32-bits all around, which helped balance its lack of strong math performance.