Yup, this basically what you booted into on a C64 for example.
With the notable exception of listing the directory, which was pretty easy through a trick from the disk drive’s DOS which meant you could load the disk directory “as a program” with a special name, “$”, and then just LIST it. But you see, the drive’s DOS had to sort of go out of its way to make that simple.
Looking at the Apple II and Commodore 64, I think it is fair to say that while the BASIC environments supported varying degrees of disk command they were quite different from what we think of as command interpreters. With Unix shells, anything you can enter into a shell script can be executed from the command line, and vice versa. If memory serves me correctly, anything that could be done from the MS/PC-DOS command line could be done from a batch file (though I don't recall if the opposite is true).
And it was precisely done because the straightforward way, which would have been something like opening a sequential channel with a dedicated directory listing command and reading out from it, would have been immensely awkward under BASIC 2.0. Hence the magic “$” program.