How to remove NA values with dplyr filter

Below is the code:

library(tidyverse)
df <- tibble(
    ~col1, ~col2, ~col3,
    1, 2, 3, 
    1, NA, 3, 
    NA, 2, 3
)

I can remove all NA observations with drop_na():

df %>% drop_na()

Or remove all NA observations in a single column (col1 for example):

df %>% drop_na(col1)

Why can't I just use a regular != filter pipe?

df %>% filter(col1 != NA)

Why do we have to use a special function from tidyr to remove NAs? How do we filter out na in r?