Yep, we had a few later-generation 486s in college. They would run Windows NT4 with full GUI - not especially well, but they'd run it. And they'd do SSL stuff adequately for the time.
ISTR the cheap "Pentium clones" at the time - Cyrix, early AMDs before the K5/K6 and Athlon - were basically souped-up 486 designs.
(As an aside - it's very noticeable how much innovation happened between a single generation of CPU architectures at that time, compared to today. Even if some of them were buggy or had performance regressions. 5x86 to K5 was a complete redesign, and the same again between K6 and K7).
ISTR the cheap "Pentium clones" at the time - Cyrix, early AMDs before the K5/K6 and Athlon - were basically souped-up 486 designs.
(As an aside - it's very noticeable how much innovation happened between a single generation of CPU architectures at that time, compared to today. Even if some of them were buggy or had performance regressions. 5x86 to K5 was a complete redesign, and the same again between K6 and K7).