I have the same reaction. I think that as consumers of media, we hear about Next through the history of Steve Jobs' career and the history of Apple, and media about those subjects is all over the place. I've never seen it out in the world, or encountered some salient cultural reference it was attached to, or saw it in anything outside of its status as a chapter in the history of Apple.
NeXT was also the platform on which Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first web browser, and on which Carmack wrote Doom. Not bad for a platform far smaller than SGI or Sun I'd say.
