What is the point of the ribbon in WordPad?

I thought the purpose of the ribbon was to aid discoverability in applications with lots of features, as well as results-oriented editing through the live previews etc.  Finding things in WordPad isn't exactly a problem and the only live gallery is the colors.  The ribbon is a lose here because it wastes space (since only a small part of the tab bar is used, and if the app is maximized only a small part of the individual tab ribbons is used), and -- at least if the menus are small and don't have submenus -- clicking a tab -> clicking something in its ribbon isn't as smooth as clicking a menu -> selecting something in the menu (in Office this is mitigated by the minitoolbar, which you don't have in WordPad).

If the idea is to make MSFT applications more consistent, I don't think it's a worthwhile tradeoff in this case.  Menu-based applications aren't going away, nor should they (for the above reasons), so it's not like the overall cognitive overhead for users will decrease.  They'll still have to deal with other apps that are menu-based.