[TylerE]

No it doesn't.

For one, Apache isn't even what I'd recommend to use for serving Drupal - at my last job we were serving 50M reqs/monthly via nginx and it worked very well.

Drupal implements the front controller pattern...it has nothing to do with URL rewriting.

It is true that if you want "pretty" URLs on Apache you need to use rewrites, but I think it is a cheap shot to characterize using a core feature as it was intended as a "hack".