I don't think Blow or parent imply there's no need for an OS, but that the instructions the CPU executes eventually are the same no matter the OS that executed the binary.
Yeah but what's the relevance of this statement? You still need an OS at the end of the day, don't you?
I think the idea is that the convention of different executable formats each with their own loader should be abandoned in favour of something closer to the machine representation. Frankly I haven't done anything that low level to be able to say how much merit this has, but on a surface level it sounds reasonable.
I was under the impression that APE encapsulates the full binaries for different OSes completely. I don't understand enough about it to be able to tell either way though.