If you're thinking about the EVM's take what smart contracts should look like then you're 100% right. General, replicated computation is a good first step but a poor idea long term.

Blockchains, both public and private, are really just distributed DB's. You wouldn't fold a protein or price an option in your DB, you'd use some external system and save the results to the DB. The same line of reasoning goes for blockchains.

This is why we made our own language from scratch -- Pact is a bit like regular SQL + procedural SQL + programmable auth. It's not Turing complete and can compile to Z3 for formal verification. Given that every execution is a transaction, and it's interfacing with a normal DB, it's performance bottleneck is are the underlying DB itself.