Is that really so bad, though? I don't know about anybody else, but I've never liked the Facebook UI. I always thought it was a confusing mess. Lite Facebook is about as close as they've gotten to something user-friendly.
Granted, that's a bit different from the ridiculousness involved with the RWW post, but they're already trying to log in to a confusing website that has been changing it's interface recently.
The point was, let's dispense with this notion that intelligence and general ability are somehow related to computer literacy. If anyone's not sure about this, I'd be more than happy to talk about one of my other clients, a guy who used to build floating homes -- not little houseboats, but multi-story works of art, on water. And he's completely lost on a computer.
The fact that it appears alien to the people you mention is probably due more to having some sort of mental block against exploring computers than to computers being actually alien to them. My mother, for instance, had for the longest time an aversion to trying stuff out on a computer for fear of damaging it. She only started getting it when I gave her an old laptop and assured her that it was ok if she totally junked it. She would still have her desktop and I no longer needed that box. Now she's happily discovering and playing games on Facebook and wasn't even fazed by the recent change in the UI. :)
You're really talking about the same thing. The fear of damaging the thing is the result of not comprehending it. A person can have the skills to use a keyboard and mouse, but until they develop a working cognitive model that holds up in novel situations, the whole thing remains pretty alien. That's how you end up with situations like this, where people are able to turn on the computer, open a browser, use a search engine, log into a web site, post a comment on the public internet, and still be completely mistaken about what is going on.
You can get someone to that level in a day or two, maybe, but really understanding it in a way that enables them to navigate intuitively in unfamiliar situations is a lot harder. I don't think we've figured out a way to teach that.