"For work reasons though I'm stuck with windows... so I'd love to skip the whole bootcamp thing entirely... but still need the drivers.."
The EFI firmware on a Mac can either emulate BIOS (like any standard EFI firmware) or on more recent Macs, do a UEFI boot. That means any OS, including Windows, that can do a BIOS or EFI boot, can run natively on a Mac. I have a friend who runs Linux on his Mac. I also have friends who run Mac Pros running Windows only because at the time Apple was getting special deals on Xeons from Apple, and they were way under what an equivalent PC cost. So they just bought a Mac Pro, wiped it, and installed Windows.
All Boot Camp does is partition the disk, it doesn't do anything at all after the partitioning, given that the rest of the capabilities are built in to the firmware.
You can download the Windows drivers for the Mac hardware separately, but on a lot of machines most things will just work using the Windows and OEM drivers. On my Mac Pro everything basically just works, but I don't get some things like an HFS file system driver or the fancy keyboard volume controls until I install the Boot Camp drivers. Sometimes the mobility GPUs don't work with the standard drivers. But for the most part, a Mac is totally just a generic Intel PC that can also run Mac OS. When it's not running Mac OS it acts exactly like a generic Intel PC. I even just install the Windows AMD drivers directly from their site for my Apple branded desktop GPU.