That is like saying "a bicycle is designed to be a two-wheeled car, where the user provides the power and balances it." Sounds awful and very impractical.

The Cat was designed as a device for entering, storing and manipulating data, primarily textual and numeric. It was also designed to be extensible, and could send and receive that info, do simple computations on numbers, including sets of them in rows and columns.

It was a lot more than a word processor, and with a very different, and from the sound of it, better UI than any word processor ever.