An anomaly from some corporate pov, maybe, but at home the PC was definitely not more open to general purpose computing than the alternatives. Most early home computers booted straight into a BASIC prompt, and the line between being a programmer and a user was far more blurred than it is now.
PCs from IBM could do this as well. There was a ROM'd BASIC in IBM computers that they would default to if they couldn't find a bootable disk. The BASIC that came with PC-DOS, BASICA.COM, was actually a wrapper for this ROM BASIC.
The clones relied on GW-BASIC and later QBasic, which came on disk and was bundled with DOS, to supply this functionality, and didn't have BASIC in ROM. In fact, some early BIOS implementations, if they did not find a bootable disk, displayed a message "NO BASIC FOUND" or similar.
