TBH, my first computer, a second-hand C64, did come with a disk drive (and a monitor!!), but that was in the early 90s, several years after the heyday of the sixty-four.
I ended up with two disk drives, and a RAM expansion, so I was able to run GEOS. But it took a good while to build up to that (I was a married, childless adult when I used the C=64, if that's any comfort).
It's been interesting to see how the next generations just don't care. If you had an Atari, CoCo, Ti... or nothing, that information was important back then.