As someone who tried to go from noob to SICP, I can attest to this.

I was really like looking forward to learning lisp after reading pg's essays, but when the time came to install the environment, I hit a brick wall.

Pg does mention a noob should get a tech-savvy friend to help him get started. Unfortunately, all the hackers I knew were in the Bay Area, but I was in South America.

Installing Lisp on a mac took me two months, working full time (between macports and other false starts, like trying to install linux). I still can't get slime on emacs; I have to run clisp in the terminal.

So, yeah, not exactly user friendly, or accessible to beginners.