It's not a hack, it's a product: "A version of Kubernetes that works anywhere, with zero configuration." You can run Kubernetes locally without a VM just fine,

It's not a hack, it's a product: "A version of Kubernetes that works anywhere, with zero configuration." You can run Kubernetes locally without a VM just fine, but a VM encapsulates everything nicely without needing to configure the host's network and so on. It doesn't "emulate" a cluster, it creates a cluster that happens to contain only one node. Plus, it works on non-Linux machines.