Okay, so a buddy of mine just upgraded from Snow Leopard to Lion. Then he calls me to ask how he can tell whether or not the upgrade succeeded. I told him to check in System Information, then look under Software. After 10 minutes of explaining to him how to get there... ... he tells me it says the OS IS 10.7. Yes, I tell him, that's Lion. So he says, "Well, why does the wallpaper show a snow leopard?" "Probably because you selected that as your wallpaper." "Well, how do I change it?" "You'll have to select a new one in the Display preferences." "Well, how do I get to the Display preferences?" "Okay, you see the square gray icon with the gears in it that's sitting in your dock?" "What's the dock?" "It's the same god damned icon you use to get to the control panel on your fucking iPad!" I swear to fucking Christ, I never thought I'd meet anyone -- anyone -- too fucking stupid to use a Mac.
They have communities full of them. http://apple.stackexchange.com I think the existence of that site, and the high level of users/activity is pretty much proof-positive that it doesn't "just work".
It does just work -- provided you have an IQ over 50 and have ever used any piece of consumer electronics made after 1946.
It's true that there are people in this day and age with computers that have absolutely no business touching one, let alone owning one ... Then you get the next level, people with a little bit of knowledge, but only enough to get them into major trouble. (I.e. "I deleted a bunch of files and now my Windows doesn't work.")
Yeah, the dude I'm talking about is just barely a hair's-breadth into that second category. He's owned a Mac Pro for about 6 months and -- literally, I wasn't kidding about this at all -- does not even know what the Dock is or what the System Preferences icon looks like. The only thing he uses the computer for is playing Call of Duty and, I guess from his total lack of knowledge about the Dock, must launch that by navigating to it in the Finder. EDIT: In re: your example, I have had to deal with that. A different friend of mine called me up once because his Windows machine wouldn't boot into Windows. After 20 minutes of trying to figure out what had changed on his machine before Windows stopped booting, he finally thought to volunteer the fact that he had deleted his Windows directory somehow. After I got over the look, I asked him why he would do that. His explanation? "Well, Windows was installed already!"
