I think that might work well in practice, but I think a lot of us hold out hope that a lot of the 'appliance users' will dig deeper and become proper 'computer

I think that might work well in practice, but I think a lot of us hold out hope that a lot of the 'appliance users' will dig deeper and become proper 'computer users', and we worry that going the separate route will prevent that, and create a population with a low computer literacy rate. Unfortunately, that seems to be the way we're going, with many people adopting iPads as their main computing platform.