[ZiiS]

"Micro-controller" is a very wide term. Today it is applied to many things that would have been a good desktop computer only 20 years ago. As you surmise it is not at all impressive that they can talk on the network (may have hardware that fully supports current generation wired and wireless networking) The Pi Pico is quite a simple micro controller, similar to the 1980s hardware that would have actually used 10BASE-T. The impressive bit is it fully software except 3 resistors; rather then having dedicated hardware.