Well nowdays, people refer to bloatware as OS. This is from wikipedia: "An operating system (OS) is a set of software that manages computer hardware resources and provides common services for computer programs." and it's provided on an Android device by the Linux Kernel. So Linux is the OS. not Dalvik VM.

Regarding OP's point; I do agree that such settings should be graphicaly available to the avarage user, and dropping to shell shouldn't be expected of everyone. Not all of us(people) want to be a techie.