I get what you're saying, but the comparison to "racing the beam" is maybe a little misleading, because the point is that you aren't "racing" the beam. Rather, the system is operating in perfect lockstep with the beam. From the software perspective, you set the scene up and then sit back while it draws. And then in the abstract and from the hardware's perspective it's not even one line at a time, it's one dot at a time.

>Rather, the system is operating in perfect lockstep with the beam.

That's the same as the Atari 2600. It just occurred to me that the name "racing the beam" is misleading because you can't be too fast either. "Matching the beam" would be a better name. My point is the graphics hardware in both the 2600 and in tile+sprite consoles assembles the graphics just before it's sent to the video output without buffering the whole frame. The main difference is the 2600 graphics hardware is typically reconfigured every line while the later consoles' graphics hardware is typically reconfigured every frame (although re-configuring between lines is usually also possible, and some games left it unchanged on some screen refreshes to save CPU time at the expense of lowering frame rate).

>from the hardware's perspective it's not even one line at a time, it's one dot at a time.

Mostly true, but I tried to make the description generic to as many systems as possible, so "line" is IMO more broadly accurate because a line is composed of dots. The Neo Geo is a tile + sprite system too, and it renders to line buffers.