As originally planned, Intel wanted to have Thunderbolt running through USB ports, only for the USB consortium to strike down that idea, resulting in the shift over to mini-DisplayPort. Now however with the waning of DisplayPort and the introduction of USB Type-C and its alternate modes, Thunderbolt is back to where Intel wanted to start all along, as a standard built on top of the common USB port.
I had forgotten about this part. Shows how much power Intel has lost with USB, though overall I see this as a good thing.
One thing that always bothered me with the design of USB 1 and 2 was it's dependance on the CPU on the host side. This was somewhat a power play by Intel to try and preserve their hold on the PC market at a time they feared PCs switching away from x86. It took until USB 3 for the protocol to offer device to device communications without involving a host CPU, and to bring over the latency benefits that can bring to time sensitive uses. (Audio and video production being one of the markets wanting low latency).
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