Specialized apps? Those are the things people buy computers to run. Why would someone pay $10k for a workstation if they can't run most of the engineering or video applications that are industry standards?

Linux is not a good desktop or workstation operating system. It's strength is the embedded market and servers. x86 and x86-64 killed the RISC workstation market, that caused most of the big engineering software vendors to stop making Unix versions (and consequently Linux versions) of their software.