Admittedly on something with a few meg of RAM, you can do wonders with text - but the basics of that kind of string handling was available on 32k 8-bit machines, and that is all that is needed.
The major limitation is not in program memory, but in RAM - but we don't often need to parse long text input (i.e. more than 256 characters), and anything that would allow me to conveniently LINE INPUT a complete NMEA sentence (for example) from the UART in one statement would be a help.