Ah, I see what you mean. I was thinking in terms of union'ing and the like where you can use set theory to compose sets of information from various queries.
SQL lacks some power on negative and consolidated joins, forcing one to write more complex queries than necessary. It is this way for good reasons, because those are exactly the kinds of joins that indexes help you least and that most hinder parallelism, so they should be avoided if possible. On my experience, it's not a large drawback, but YMMV.