Kudos to the author for trying to bring org mode to a wider audience. It was definitely the gateway drug to Emacs for me, and now that I've been using org for awhile I honestly can't see myself ever switching to another personal task manager/productivity tool. I always recommend it to others, but alas, the Emacs barrier is too big for most to overcome.

I do have one suggestion: don't try to emulate the feature set of Emacs org mode exactly. While I love org mode, the setup time and effort was many orders of magnitude greater than any other tool I've used before, and I can't say it enabled me to be many orders of magnitude more productive. I would love to have an org mode with sensible defaults (such as indented bullets, project-based agenda view, etc...) with a narrow feature set. For me, the killer features are:

* Mixed notes and TODOs. It was a revelation to be able to just type a TODO into any notes and know that this will magically appear on my master TODO list. But for this to be useful, you really need...

* The agenda view. For those not familiar, this is essentially a consolidated list of todos across all your org files. But I never found the default agenda view that useful, so I again spent lots of time writing one myself. Now I use it many times a day.

* Timers. The way org mode does timers is miles better than any other time tracking software I've ever used.

* Flexible 'projects'. In org mode I have a lot of flexibility in how I treat projects (for me a project is simply a TODO with 1 or more nested TODO). With my agenda view I can quickly see all my projects with two keystrokes.

* Flexible TODO recurrence. Most task managers only let you repeat a TODO every so often, but org has a powerful syntax for defining whatever recurrence pattern you want (i.e. do this task every week on Friday and have it done within 3 days)

* TODOs dates as scheduled or deadlines. It is always surprising to me how other task managers don't recognize this difference. If you schedule yourself to do something on a certain date, it is very different than saying 'you have to get this done by this date'.

* TODO workflows. Most task managers have tepid support for a TODO as a workflow with potential alternate and blocking states (such as waiting on someone before you can do the TODO), but with org mode you can precisely define TODO workflows and do all sorts of cool stuff with them.

* Habits. The way org does habits is simply brilliant.

Keep up the good work!