[qb45]

One could argue that address overflow above 1MB was not a bug, but a feature of the early real-mode CPUs and hence (ab)using it wasn't really a bug either.

Probably even Intel didn't anticipate protected mode with its 24 bit address bus when designing the 8086. 1MB was enough for everyone at this time.

[pandaman]

Exactly my point. Intel was "forced" to fix a bug in software by changing its hardware. The A20 gate was not to prevent programs from accessing "HMA" it was to fix programs, which generated addresses above 0xfffff and expected it to wrap around.