The Arduino is an Atmel chip on a small board with a few components for simplifying the power supply and USB communication, plus an IDE and a few libraries for simplifying the development.
There's nothing "basic" about the hardware itself: you can at any time switch to C and compile with gcc, just like for any Atmel chip.
There's nothing "basic" about the hardware itself: you can at any time switch to C and compile with gcc, just like for any Atmel chip.