Spot on.I think he's actually talking about something totally un-related to computers. (and much, much nicer....on some days) Such as.....women?
Anyway, i'm guessing in early days of the Mac the Happy Mac was to indicate everything was ok, that the disk was bootable and that the machine was operationally sound. Later on as hard disks came in, the Mac OS evolved and hardware became more complex, it seemed redundant but still a Macintosh Icon (pardon the pun). It had a good run and I fail to see why some are so emotional over a 32x32 pixel graphic no longer present (and yes, there are the few like that out there).