To an outsider, it seems like the BEAM documentation [and particularly, videos] go out of their way to discuss how process management and IPC communication works and how certain classes of data are managed. They talk about what makes the BEAM the BEAM to exclusion of all other concerns.

Prior to finding this document (http://www.cs-lab.org/historical_beam_instruction_set.html) I had no idea whether you could actually do computation on the BEAM. I was starting to wonder if they had misappropriated the term VM, and some sort of inline assembly trick was being used for everything but control flow and IPC.

Interpreted code has very, very real computational constraints and you can't assume people will know this, even now. Especially if your system is noteworthy for how it is not like other systems. Where does it stop being 'weird' and start being conventional? The boundaries describe both sides of a distinction. Even if you're only interested in the exotic part, leave some breadcrumbs for others.