The biggest thing you are underselling (if at all), is that you can have a repl directly into the device itself and doing lots of exploratory programming directly in-circuit.
https://github.com/micropython/micropython/pull/5026
Still quite a lot of work left for pdb-like features but I'm optimistic it'll get there!
POKE
(who named these interesting commands?)
> One of the earliest references to these commands in BASIC, if not the earliest, is in Altair BASIC[4].
[4] https://archive.org/stream/bitsavers_mitsMITSAl_6669937/MITS...
So, it seems to date back to 1975.