What are you talking about, dilettante?

Wrappers are usually slower than direct calls to windows api. Although I may agree that using api isn't always necessary it's often much faster approach.
You may discuss unicode/ansi conversion for as long as you want however in the end the fastest time wins. Try doing recursive search without FindFirst using perhaps Dir function which is nothing more than a wrapper...
Regardless how thin is the wrapper it's still a wrapper.