I do not disagree with that, my point was just that you are not wasting clock cycles, you may however, as you pointed out, be wasting time while waiting for I/O

I do not disagree with that, my point was just that you are not wasting clock cycles, you may however, as you pointed out, be wasting time while waiting for I/O to complete which you could potentially make better use of by using some more clock cycles while the I/O operation is in progress to do more work which is not dependent on the I/O result.