curiosity about makefile directive

["Robert P. J. Day" <rpjday mindspring com>]

  just perusing the kernel Makefile, and i was intrigued 
by the lines:

  ifeq (.config,$(wildcard .config))
  ...
  ifeq (.depend,$(wildcard .depend))

i was confused since the argument to the "wildcard" function 
didn't have any wildcard characters in it.  i eventually realized
that all this is doing is checking for the existence of those
files.

is there no more intuitive way of doing this using gnu make
directives?  it seems so, well, kludgy.

rday