Windows 2008 needs NetBIOS to join Windows domain

Today, I was installing Windows 2008 Enterprise on a 64-bit machine. I decided to use this installation to write up a new server build document for the organization. As part of the process, I decided to disable any unnecessary services in Windows 2008 that were not of use. Later on, I noticed that I could not join the newly created server to our Domain. As it turned out, I had disabled an important service, TCP/IP Helper for NetBIOS. After enabling this service, I was able to join the Windows 2008 server to the domain without any problem. The error message that I was getting stated that 'Network path cannot be found'.

Come on, I thought MS was doing away with WINS and NETBIOS. What's this?