I've worked with many first time users over 20 years and have never witnessed any of them intuitively understand either CLI or GUI, both are artificial, contrived and unique and need to be learnt. I don't essentially see one as a better choice than the other for a new user, maybe in some ways the CLI has less abstractions which can be a help, I've witnessed much confusion over the many many ways you can enact the same result using different methods in a GUI.