It basically is that. It's a standardized sticks and stones. Plus objects for some reason. But I don't think the objects are a bad thing - it allows multiple implementations of sometimes to co-exist - consider using two different GPUs from different vendors at the same time. It took a really long time to make OpenGL support that, but DirectX could always do it (at least at the API level) by just creating two different ID3DDevice objects backed by different code from different DLLs both loaded at the same time.