Thats not at all true. The original OpenGL API is very much a direct mapping of the original SGI graphics hardware. Most openGL calls on SGI are single cpu instructions feeding the data to the hardware, which fully implements the whole OpenGL state machine.
Its just that modern GPUs work in completely different ways, so this kind of API is useless for them.
Its just that modern GPUs work in completely different ways, so this kind of API is useless for them.