If you read “everything broken for non-expert users that can't compile their own kernel modules”, how long has it been since you used Linux?

Your example is spot on. I once spent over an hour with a friend who wanted to test a multimedia application [1] on OS X and tried to help her installing it. In the end it turned out that installing the needed C compiler and SDL dependencies – a task that is only an “apt-get install” away on Debian – was a lot harder on OS X than we both had expected.

[1] IBNIZ: http://pelulamu.net/ibniz/