Vladimir:

allows the system to view the substrate on which it executes and the environment outside the box as being involved in the same computational process

This intuitively makes sense to me.

While I think that GZIP etc. on an extremely big computer is still just GZIP, it seems possible to me that the line between these systems and systems that start to treat their external environments as a computational resource might be very thin. If true, this would really be bad news.