Is Kubernetes the New Computer?

No. Kubernetes is a complicated piece of orchestration software that codifies some of the techniques giant tech companies like Google and Facebook have developed to work at their scale.

Under the hood you still have to configure and manage the actual computers and their operating systems, which means you're also running Chef, Puppet, or the like. You need to have a pretty big engineering organization (handwavingly, the few hundred engineer range) before it makes sense to run both the config manager and Kubernetes.

Managed Kubernetes may change this equation for you if you're going that route.

Kubernetes might not be the new IBM PC, but it is in fact the new platform that is the de facto standard to deploy and manage web services and the infrastructure used to run them. There's no way around it, and that's good thing.