"Elegant" was probably the wrong word. "Modular" is better. I think that biology does support the idea that reuse in biology is most successful when what is reused is a "module" with some of the same virtues that make software modules reusable and retargetable - they are naturally parameterized, they are strongly coherent, and they have loose coupling to other subsystems.

Examples in biology are the reuse of the core genetic machinery of translation, transcription, and replication, as well as the core metabolism of biochemistry. And in development, we have the HOX genes and the rest of the evo-devo toolkit discussed by, for example, Kirschner and Gerhart. These systems are not exactly 'simple', but neither are they needlessly baroque.

I'm guessing that these same principles of system reuse apply to animal locomotion, though I admit that I know a lot less about anatomy and neuroscience than I do about biochemistry and molecular biology.