NeXT was contractually obliged to not compete with Apple, which pretty much meant they had to stay out of the consumer and home markets, and focus on business and education. That's why their products were very expensive hardcore UNIX workstations (with the best GUI that had ever been put on a UNIX).
If Apple had chosen Be, then Jobs would have had to wait until the combined Apple+Be was well and dead before moving back into the personal computer market.
On the other hand, had NeXT stayed independent, they would have been able to continue their relationship with Sun and the merger of OPENSTEP and Java, and the combined product could have started weakening the Windows monopoly long before OS X became competitive due to the Intel transition. (It's not too hard to imagine the NeXT/Java development environment seriously catching on in enterprise environments circa 1999.)
If Apple had chosen Be, then Jobs would have had to wait until the combined Apple+Be was well and dead before moving back into the personal computer market.
On the other hand, had NeXT stayed independent, they would have been able to continue their relationship with Sun and the merger of OPENSTEP and Java, and the combined product could have started weakening the Windows monopoly long before OS X became competitive due to the Intel transition. (It's not too hard to imagine the NeXT/Java development environment seriously catching on in enterprise environments circa 1999.)