This is the kind of thinking that destroyed GNOME 3.
"User-friendly" depends entirely on the user in question. I find Gnome 2 to be considerably more "user-friendly" than Gnome 3, because Gnome 3 frustrated my attempts to do what I expected to be able to do.
For that matter, I consider bash (and coreutils and family) considerably more user friendly than Gnome, for a given value of "user" (me).
This in turn lessened the transition friction, as people try to do something but do not find it where they expect it from memory.