Looking more closely I think I was less turned away by the content (which is there) than the progression of the tutorial. I started out scared by the "no conditionals, no loop constructs, no functions, no aliases" - What I really needed was something confidence-building, like
; for i in `{ns} {echo $i | sed 's/.* //'} | sort | uniq
It looks familiar, and you can mostly puzzle it out without having to know a lot. More to the point, it looks like something you'd do every day. It's also a nice introduction to the `for` construct and it introduces a quoting syntax. "Just enough rope to hang yourself." No doubt we wouldn't guess that those braces are for lambdas, but that's easy enough to correct. Perhaps my complaint says more about me than you - I'm more than happy to `load std` before I even know what a module is, because all I really want to do is process some text. Similarly, I can appreciate conceptual cleanness in a language, but in a shell especially it's an ancillary benefit.
The short digression on escaping and quoting (`fourspaces` and all that) at the end of the "Fetching Web Pages" is lovely. Really, that's exactly what I was after - "This is Bash and it's annoying, this is Inferno and it just works right." It's succinct and it clearly shows that Inferno does better than the alternative (and when you're convincing someone to use your shell the argument is as much about Bourne and Bash as it is about your option.)