I never had a IBM PC w/ a cassette port, but reading thru this article I see that EA's Music Construction Set had an option to output sound on the cassette port. It looks like the digitization method "Inside the Apple IIe" uses (looking for zero-crossings and making a 1-bit square wave approximation of the sampled audio) would work on the PC hardware.
I cannot say how it was for the C64, because they were hardly seen on Iberian Penisula.
I think the fact that just about everyone bought a PC with disc drives / DOS, and never used ROM BASIC directly meant PC clones just saved the $30 (or whatever) of ROM chips and loaded all of BASIC from disc.
I think the core problem of the PCjr is it was trying to be all things to all people by being part PC, part low-end computer, and part gaming console.