system_os_task() Unnecessary in Blinky Code?

I'll preface this with the fact that I haven't worked with the ESP8266 SDK for very long but when I was messing around with the Blinky code example, I got it working just fine without system_os_task() and all the user_procTask variables and functions that go with it. I know that those come in handy for adding functionality down the road but if this is supposed to be a barebones example, why include all that cruft?