It's really more of a reflection on where we're at in the timeline of computing, with humans having been the major user of apps and webs site up until now. Obviously we've had screen scraping and terminal emulation access to legacy apps for a while, and this is a continuation of that.

There have been, and continue to be, computer-centric ways to communicate with applications though, such as Windows COM/OLE, WinRT and Linux D-Bus, etc. Still, emulating human interaction does provide a fairly universal capability.