There's another thing about the Commodore computers that is really special. The binaries for disk and tape games consisted of the machine code for the game, along with a stub BASIC program to jump into it (typically one line with a SYS command).

Meaning that the entire computer, and all its capabilities and speed, was available from within BASIC.

This was true of many home computers of the era, and even of the IBM PC if you were willing to struggle a bit, but it was emphatically not true of all of them: the TI-99/4A, for instance, had a nerfed BASIC that was not only very slow, it also prevented access to any of the system's facilities outside of the commands BASIC provided. This probably had a lot to do with its unusual memory architecture, in which only 128 words of RAM were provided to the CPU and all BASIC memory was accessed indirectly through the video chip.

But yeah, aside from cartridge-based games, every program on the C64 was a BASIC program, just one that was mostly a machine-code memory image.

I'm looking through the user guide (0 link), and it's pretty interesting. It's fascinating how the structure is laid out in a way that lets you grasp how everything works all at once.