A telescope that only points is fighting a losing battle the moment you find your target — the Earth’s rotation carries everything in the sky steadily westward, and at high magnification that drift becomes visible within seconds.
An equatorial mount solves this with one clever piece of geometry: tilt the mount’s main rotation axis to match your latitude, and it points at the celestial pole, the one fixed point the whole sky appears to rotate around. From there, turning that single axis at exactly the sidereal rate — very slightly faster than 24 hours per rotation — keeps a target centered indefinitely, no second axis of correction required.
It’s a 17th-century solution to a problem modern motors just execute more precisely. The math hasn’t changed; only the motor driving it has.