Concur. It's simply called abstraction (cf ISO OSI layering). Keeping time is one problem, presenting it is another.
Abstraction empowers (when done right). For example, manufacturers of common PC timer hardware could have added the functionality for synchronizing to radio signals. "Could". All those op systems that allowed, or even considered, setting RTC to localtime, were disgracefully short-sighted.
(Come to think about it, the standard UNIX utilities/pagers ought to have had standard options for recognizing logfile timestamps and rendering them human-readable.)
