That’s exactly what it is! Although I tried to make it better (of course 
).
The nice thing is that openhab runs Z-Wave under any OS, so you can just shut down your HassIO instance and boot openhab on your main computer and try stuff out. Once you are done you plug the z-wave stick back into your HassIO instance and everything is back to the way it was.
That’s actually how I do my migraion from openhab1 at the moment 
Z-Wave on openhab just runs - no need to fuddle around with openzwave, entity configuration. For Z-Wave to work I had very long restart times, I don’t have with openhab. Also inclusion/exclusion of devices and setting device configuration is much easier. Having to rename the automatically created entities was a pain, too. The energy consumption of devices did often not work, since the “senser_multilevel” instead “meter_w” command class is required. Also the automatically created entities did not always work properly (I have a heating controller that did not work with Hass).
Since it is possible to do textual configuration of the devices and things the Z-Wave configuration is persistent and nice again (although not as mighty as in openhab1).