I personally learned a lot more about how computers work from assembly than from C. One example: C programmers talk about "the stack", but it's an implementation detail, you can learn C without knowing what the stack really is. Assembly will teach you.

As for process spawning, I/O, etc.: it might be that C is just as good as assembly for those, but I would be surprised if either was sufficient. Presumably that's where "hardware and OS-related literature" comes in.