I think these things can be equivalent. It all depends on the definition of wait.

The simple example can be x86 with monitor/mwait instructions. These will suspend a hardware thread until it can be awoken when the memory write happens to the monitored address. Nothing happens on that cpu thread in the meanwhile. Yet at the same time if things are being virtualized the higher authority exists and it can do something else with the CPU until the write. Same for OS type of event synchronization like Linux futex.

I would argue that the wait abstraction is more powerful. The alternative isn’t powerful enough to enable these kinds of “wake me when I can be useful again” behaviors.