The "unprivileged package management" is the important feature here from the GNU point of view. One of the philosophical underpinnings of the GNU project is em

The "unprivileged package management" is the important feature here from the GNU point of view. One of the philosophical underpinnings of the GNU project is empowering non-superusers as far as possible - that's why they've stuck with the microkernel design, too. The idea there is that non-superusers would be able to easily run their own filesystem or TCP stack, for example, since it's just a matter of running their own daemon. Once you understand this, a lot of GNU's technical decisions make more sense.