Exactly this. Most consoles of the era were set up fundamentally to work with tightly defined graphical regimes. For the NES as an example, has almost zero ability to work with pixels or bits. It fundamentally at a hardware level deals with tiles. Sprite tiles are 8 by 8, or doublewide 8x16 if you put in some effort. You can build larger sprites by combining sprite tiles, but be careful because the hardware that processes this can only handle 8 sprites per scanline.

PC's have typically had a much more bitmapped graphical regime, where individual pixels are addressable and drawable, which better suits a general purpose computer but means you have to do some trickery if you want to get some of the polish that consoles had, and was typically slower since you didn't have dedicated hardware that spoke in those terms. on the flip side though setting up a windowing system on an NES with its hardware speaking in sprites and tiles would be a nightmare.

Essentially, yeah. You give it a list of pointers to background tiles and a list of pointers to sprites and tell it where you want them drawn. It then does that for you at 60fps for free.

The downside is that that's all it does. That's the whole graphics system. You can't like, paint an individual pixel.

(you can, if you treat each tile as a mini framebuffer, which is how something like the NES port of Elite is possible, but this is expensive and you only have a very small amount of processing time and a limited number of tiles)

Primitive graphics accelerators are exactly why console games were much more advanced and fluid for a long time.

PCs staggered on thanks to much faster 32-bit CPUs, but they didn't really pull ahead until 3D cards became the norm towards the late 90s.