I don't expect a giant terminal shell but I do expect the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and other open source parts of the Linux ecosystem such as systemd and X

I don't expect a giant terminal shell but I do expect the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and other open source parts of the Linux ecosystem such as systemd and X11/Wayland. The kernel itself isn't the only part of "desktop Linux" in the sense that many people refer to it in.