Konqueror was not designed or intended solely to be a web browser, but is also the default filesystem browser for KDE 2.0. Like
Nautilus for
GNOME, Konqueror is a post-Internet Explorer browser in that it sees network destinations as just another thing in your system, and web pages as just another network destination. Unlike IE, Nautilus and Konqueror were designed for this concept from the beginning, rather than having it tacked on a few versions down the road.
One of Konq's most promising features as a file browser is its integration of the standard UNIX command line as a panel within the browser. It doesn't get you the same integration of CLI and GUI as something like the experimental XMLterm, but it is a potentially interesting step towards integrating the flexibility of language back into the "point-and-grunt" of mouse-based file browsing and manipulation. (See Don Gentner and Jakob Nielsen's famous essay "The Anti-Mac User Interface" for more on this last idea. Interestingly, the KDE developer site hosts a summary of this essay in their user interface guidelines.)