If that is true then why is "DevOps" a new thing? Where is the break in continuity between the old-school sysadmins who did all this stuff anyway, and the new-school who think it even needs a special name (and that they've invented it themselves)?
When you have a big complex environment with thousands of servers all running the same code, it makes sense to start treating the hardware itself like software components. All modifications to hardware can be committed to a central SVN repository and pushed out with post-commit scripts. As long as you can script all types of OS patches, firmware updates, etc, using some type of language and an automation tool like Puppet or Cfengine, this can be done.
For a large company like Google or any cloud provider I'm sure it makes sense to start treating your server infrastructure like software components and have the same type of change control, QA, and deployment methodologies wrapped around it.
If you're working on a team that is responsible for both then devops isn't a useful concept - you're probably doing it already. Many people are not so lucky.