> Even your compiled machine language is ultimately far more abstracted from what the processor actually does than it was on, say, a 6502
Funny that you bring up 6502; that reminds me of 1541 disk drive for C64, which had mostly same 6502 as the host computer (albeit running at slower speed).
Most disk drives of the time were like that. One of the reasons the Apple II disk drive was so affordable is that Woz just used the Apple II's own 6502 to handle the grunt work, with their disk drive being little more than a drive mechanism, a PROM, and some ICs. Since this is The Woz we're talking about, he went ahead and broke with conventional encoding while he was at it and instead implemented a scheme which allowed for a few extra sectors per track.
It might be an interesting exercise to see how many peripherals are connected to your PC right now that have much more computing power than an 1Mhz 6502.
The Apple ][ disk encoding was not done to allow "for a few extra sectors per track". Since the Apple ][ did not have a disk controller, the encoding from magnetic flux to bits was handled in software. A 1Mhz 6502 cannot handle the "standard" encoding (things like M2FM) in software as the disc was rotating. Woz's encoding allowed the encoding.
The 6502 in the 1541 runs at 1MHz, that is indeed a bit slower than the NTSC version C64 CPU (1.023MHz), but a bit faster than the PAL version CPU (0.985MHz)
Funny that you bring up 6502; that reminds me of 1541 disk drive for C64, which had mostly same 6502 as the host computer (albeit running at slower speed).