You're stuck in the UNIX-ism of everything is a file. So things are files in Unix that in other operating systems are not. COM1 is a file in Windows. It doesn't

You're stuck in the UNIX-ism of everything is a file. So things are files in Unix that in other operating systems are not. COM1 is a file in Windows. It doesn't make sense to transfer COM1 over the network. You can't store it. You can't send /dev/null over the network. You can send a representation of it via NFS, but anything you write to it via NFS isn't writing to the file, you're writing it back to the original server that you mapped NFS from. The representation of it isn't the file, just like a map isn't the terrain. If I map a filesystem over the network, I'm still not sending the file over the network. I'm just sending a hook for the server that's getting mapped to know what's going on. When I say most people, I mean most users. Most users aren't concerned with socket files, or write only files, or device files, because they aren't things they're concerned with. They think of a file as a blob of data, with maybe metadata for who can access it (et al). So, for the purposes of storing files, a file is a blob of data, not something being exposed across the network through special drivers.