That's true. Still, I think cheph is right to point out that the situation has changed since then. I honestly got so caught up in the rhetoric of the OP that I had forgotten this for a moment.

In particular, we now download whatever software tools we like from this lovely internet thing, so it's less of a concern what programming environment the OS bundles by default.

Back then your choices on UNIX were to either accept whatever your vendor included (which would mostly be C), or buy a disk set of some other tools and hope they actually worked on your machine.