The B-side of storage containerisation

Hardware access

There's no reason that a container can't have direct hardware access. I think you're mistaking containerisation for virtualisation. It's misleading to call containers a form of virtualisation - they're not running on emulated hardware but rather directly on the host hardware, which is why they can access it.

It's actually best described as a way of bundling software and it's dependencies and running them so that they're isolated from other containers; more like a super-fancy chroot.

And of course you wouldn't put your actual data within a container anyway - there's stuff you can do with data volume containers, but the real question is, what's the point? There's no real benefit to it.

I think the point you made about putting GUI components etc. into containers is the only sensible use of containers when it comes to storage, but just because you've put something in a container it doesn't mean you're committed to updating the container every few days? What makes you think that this is forced on containers any more than it's forced on 'traditional' applications?