>Not really; it's structurally nothing like assembly, which is as close as you can get to the hardware without just handcoding machine code.

Here, assembly is touching the hardware. If you write your code in assembly, it's not portable to other architectures, even hypothetically.

>provides very little in terms of safety features that get in the way of direct hardware manipulation

Exactly. So it's a heck of a lot closer to the hardware than most 3GLs.