This is a bit like

  $ echo 'Hello World!'

which if, you think about it, requires a kernel, multitasking, driver independence on various level, many drivers, memory management, possible resource accounting, binary api, dynamic linker, interpreter, etc, etc, etc.

All (or at least most) of this seems overkill if you just want to print out 'hello world'. But it makes total sense if you want to do a little more complex stuff.