What I really meant was that with a printer, all the critical timing happens in the printer. There are no servo-loops on the PC and you don't need a real-time OS to print to paper.
Who cares where the servo loops or trajectory planning are? When the end user presses a button to move the machine they don't care how it is implemented. They only care that it works. Running a machine takes CPU cycles. You can either use the CPU in your PC or an external one. What difference does it make?
Think of your printer example. Do you know or care how much processing is done in the PC? For example the driver may convert your print page to PostScript and send that to the printer. The printer then renders that PostScript to an image of the page. Alternatively the driver may render the print to a bitmap image of the page and send that to the printer. The only real difference is in where the processing is done. To the end user the experience is exactly the same.
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