But I stress it's not about the scaling. It's about the features even at a single node. I wouldn't be spending time writing this stuff had it not been revelatory for me.
PS. If you're not able to try it on GKE, there's also https://github.com/kubernetes/kops. GKE is great for trying, at least, though. Just get a cluster running and get rolling with the concepts. Then you'll know what it's all about. There isn't that much to it, and what there is to it is great and well documented with a great community.