How is it interpreted? Something that you load into memory and then set the processor's Instruction Pointer at is not interpreted at all. And in case /init is a shell script, it's not the kernel doing the interpreting -- the interpreter would be /bin/sh, which would still be loaded into memory and executed by the processor. Claiming that machine code is "interpreted" because it still needs to be finalized by a loader is not a clever gotcha -- it's ignorant erasure of relevant distinctions.