Perhaps what’s confusing you is that you see this as a spectrum with two end points 
Conda is neither. It doesn’t act (nor depend, for the most part) on system packages – though you can have a system-wide install of Anaconda, I suspect it’s not the dominant use case, at least among community users (perhaps it’s different among “enterprise” users?). It’s also not language-specific – I think you already understood that.
I’m not sure if there’s a catchy phrase to describe Conda, but perhaps it’s an end-user package manager. You don’t need to be a systems administrator (and you don’t risk hosing your system), and you don’t need to be a developer / integrator either.
By the way, Conda is probably farther from the system than Pip is. On Unix systems at least, Pip generally relies on a system-wide Python install (perhaps symlinked in a virtual environment) that links to many system-provided libraries (e.g. compression and encryption libraries). Conda doesn’t, it keeps the system dependencies extremely minimal in order to offer a reliable execution environment regardless of the system it’s deployed on.