I disagree. You cannot take your Akai MPC out of the box and ask it to play music. You have to load samples, you have to arrange them and you have to instruct it to play. That seems like a far cry to me from "playing themselves." You still have to... write the music.
Because "load samples, arrange them, and instruct it to do a thing" are basically the required steps.
Arguably, if you don't care much about the result, you can skip loading samples.
> You still have to... write the music.
When? When you load up other folk's samples? When you press a play button? When you arrange other folk's samples?
It's a recording device that plays samples. It doesn't give a flying flip about who wrote them.
You might choose to write samples, lots of people using them don't.