DOS seems to have been the minimal effort choice of "It's like CP/M enough our users will be familiar with it" without actually considering those users. Now to be fair in 1981 that was "state of the art". The Xerox Alto was something that was way beyond reach for most people and GEOS (8 or 16bit) wasn't going to exist for another 5 years. But it was a marginal improvement over CP/M, which is about as much as one can say about it.

Modern UEFI is probably the best parallel, both in that it only really deals with text and some graphics (bitmaps only) and doesn't have any standardized interface for sound/3d.