Indeed!
One caveat, you can buy a stock, and have it transferred from the exchange to the broker to you, and then call up the corporation and have it placed in your name.
Of course, when you do this, you find out just how bad the system is.
They may try to bribe you to not take the stock off the exchange. They will actually offer you more than it is worth.
Or, you may get a CDCC failure to deliver. Or, in laymen's speech, you never owned it… sucker.
They want an ETF because they own the bitcoin, while their customers play around with the paper. Anything happens, and they end up with the bitcoin.
Unfortunately, for them, bitcoin is going to wreck the ETFs. Bitcoin is going to shoot up, while they are supposed to be buying to match ETF purchases, and then it is going to drop so fast that the order books can't keep up. The shorts and the longs will get wrecked, coming and going. And then, bitcoin becomes unobtanium. No one is selling for The US paper. People will have to be paid out cash value, which, unless the Fed is really behind them, is more dollars than anyone has.
And then, maybe people will realize, they could have just bought bitcoin, the real thing, all along.