Ubuntu had a spin-off edition called EDUbuntu. I liked that distro, as it had alot of useful apps in it but the maintainers moved on to other things.
At one point, I read that one or more countries in Europe adopted Linux as their main desktop infrastructure. I think it was Spain and Germany, but, don’t quote me on that. The economic drive for it is as you you stated, hardware requirements / costs were a fraction of what they were under a full Windows implementation, not to mention licensing.
With the virtualization technology we have today, Linux is positioned well for any sort of mass deployment. Industries just have to break their addiction to the MS suite of tools.