In my opinion, it's less that x86 is any more or less user-friendly, and more about having an environment that gives you the "raw" bare-metal feeling that you c

In my opinion, it's less that x86 is any more or less user-friendly, and more about having an environment that gives you the "raw" bare-metal feeling that you could once have from DOS. You can write a few instructions, write to video memory, and the result is right there. You can still get that feeling on x86. For instance, try writing some code directly in the MBR of a disk that writes some bytes to the serial port on 0x3f8 with outb, and load it up in KVM.