You're right but for the majority of enterprise developers this isn't a concern. Much of the time they do not understand the orchestration at all. If a configuration in an environment gets fudged then they'll either punt to someone else or stick their head in the sand and use it as an excuse at stand ups as to why they're not completing tasks.
They're not VMs in the sense that none of the tried and true methods for orchestrating VMs is available. You need new solutions for networking, new solutions for storage, new failover patterns, new tools for clustering and organizing them, new application patterns, etc. Basically all the stuff that would have been handled by the hypervisor and the software defined networking layer is now all of a sudden in your face and you need some way to deal with it.