As part of the definition of the monad it includes "applying" computation on the underlying dataset (wrapping and then applying a function is defined). The mondad also defines the resultant type of the operation (unwrapping) and so in another language, something like mapping a function over a dataset is a built in "consequence" of the definition.

This makes it natural to express a program as a pipeline of operations over a variety of dataset inputs by wrapping, mapping, and unwrapping operations.

An example is something like the IO monad in haskell allows a programmer to incorporate non-functional (side-effect) computations (e.g. writing to disk or to console) naturally where as a 1d list (more like a buffer) doesn't naturally express the same semantics