True, but the Apple Watch is in most ways just an iPhone accessory, and you could make this same argument about any iPhone accessory (though other accessories typically aren't as expensive as the Apple Watch is).
But Apple entered the smart watch market by making an iPhone accessory. Whereas when they entered the smart phone market they made a phone for everyone, not just Mac users. On the other hand IIRC the original iPod required a Mac and they opened that up later.
AFAIK all smart watches require other devices to configure them. Even if you give them cellular connections and whatnot, the screen is just too tiny to do any real configuring on the device directly. But who knows, maybe someday we'll have Apple Watches that can be configured using icloud.com.