However having Nano as default is the better choice. You as an expert know how to change the default. Newbies who don't likely will prefer a discoverable editor like Nano.
That's precisely when nano is the least adequate: "sudo -e" or "crontab -e" won't pass the "-w" flag to nano, and without that flag, the automatic hard line wrapping can easily corrupt config files which depend on line breaks for their semantics (a crontab being a great example, where each line is a separate entry).
Speak for yourself. It's not better for me and I had to do some googling to figure out how to change the default when it was changed to Nano. I'm not an "expert" in any sense, but I'm sure a lot more comfortable with VIM than Nano.
Also, I'm not sure most people setting up VMs newbies, at least in the way you're using the word. I have no problems with Nano being installed as the default on some distros. I just wish it weren't on the one I use!