I agree! I've been thinking about why terminal software is so compelling, and how to make that the default while keeping the system accessible to beginners. I think there's a way to do it, to unify GUI, TUI and CLI.
It never took off for various reasons. For one, the language was a bit like lisp, but with brackets. More importantly, it was commercial and then closed source for too long when Perl was really taking off.
Long story short though, whatever language you implement should have extremely high level primitives for simple GUI widgets. Forget Qt and Windows Forms...there HAS to be an easier solution. I can see how Rebol did it and surely you can make something like that possible.
The main issue is the lack of self-bootstrapping.