The Hitachi Peach came out a year or more earlier than the PC and had really good RGB colour graphics (640 x 200), 80x25 text, light pen, along with one of the most capable 8-bit CPUs of the time, the 6809. It didn't sell well as it was very expensive here in Australia. I can't imagine there would have been a lot of software available for it either.
According to
this forum post that was the
Hitachi MB-6890 Basic Master Level 3.
It did sell reasonably well (though not as well as the NEC, Sharp and, a couple of years later, Fujitsu machines, eventually leading to Fujitsu replacing Hitachi in the
8-bit gosanke). It obviously didn't sell very well outside of Japan, but that wasn't unusual for Japanese 8-bit computers; the PC-8001 suffered the same fate.
The graphics were actually "normal" for the time; in Japan by 1981 640 × 200 graphics (often in 8 colours with RGB output) were becoming standard amongst the higher-end home computers. It could do 8 colours only in 320 × 200, unlike the later and cheaper Fujitsu FM-8 and FM-7, which had a full 48K frame buffer (separate from the 64K system RAM) and did 640 × 200 in 8 colours. (The FM-7 is what ended up killing the Basic Master.) But the MB-6890 did have one interesting feature: it could do 640 × 400 in interlaced mode, and they sold a special long-persistence monitor to take advantage of this. This would be great for Japanese word processing, though I'm not sure how widespread this was. (I've done a fair amount of research into Japanese home computer hardware from the late '70s and early '80s, but not much into software.)
I actually have an MB-6890 and rather lucked out with mine; as well as a disk controller card, it also includes a co-processor card with a Z80 on it. One day I have to figure out how to get that working.
A sarcastic take on the opinion that CGA hardware was not up to the task... (including reference to Sega's bs. advertising terms

)
Ah, I get it now. And I was going to ask what "blast processing" was, but now I'm glad I didn't. :-)
You're kidding right? I personally knew people using them for that - it didn't take much for a business to use a Vic 20 and a printer to write up invoices and add up totals. You don't even need a disk drive for that.
Didn't someone recently post a picture of a Vic20 being used as a cash register still today in a far away country?
I'd be curious to know what kind of software they were running. I can see the 5K VIC-20 (or pretty much anything) being used as a very basic preprogramed embedded system, much like half a point of sale system (totals and prints receipts and invoices, but without the long-term record keeping). But when I was speaking of "business software," I had in mind word processing, spreadsheets, database systems, accounting systems (general ledger, accounts receivable, etc.), and so on. A VIC-20 simply isn't going to do that; it doesn't have the memory and the screen would be overly painful for it anyway. (You can get maybe three cells across the screen on a spreadsheet if you limit them to 5 digits.)