I would say it was intended as the main processor for supercomputers. I did a design like that (though it ended up actually built with old 68020s we already had in stock to save money) and there were many others. Intel itself had some interesting machines.

But Intel realized that asking customers to jump from x86 to an incompatible architecture (either the i860 or i960) was too risky - they could just as well jump to a competitor's architecture instead. So they repositioned their RISCs as coprocessors. It is amazing that they forgot this not too many years later with the Itanium.

My Smalltalk processor project is going very well, though obviously this is not the place for details.