You could say that the 80386 was the first "real" processor Intel ever made. It finally had all the things that 'big' computers of the time had; multitasking, protected memory, virtual memory... and the 32-bit guts didn't hurt either.
As an interesting side note, under my window sill at home, serving as one leg of a shelf, is an old NEC Powermate 3/25. A 386dx-25, dontcha' know. The interesting thing about it is that it possesses a mythical Intel 385 chip as well. Why? Because this baby has 16 SIMM slots, which can each (in theory) take an 8 meg 30-pin SIMM, for a total of 128 meg of RAM. Unheard of in the heady days of '90.