You have a good point.

I don't think it needs to be this way. A lot of tasks that we ask users to perform are out of their knowledge scope. We gussy them up with dialog boxes like

'It looks like you've lost your network connection, would you like me to repair that'

And then Windows goes out and does an down/up on the network card, reapplies for an IP and I don't know what all.

To the user, the computer pauses for a minute, the computer notifies 'You're up, back to pr)n surfing' and away they go.

I think if people can learn to swipe a credit card then they could learn to insert their smart card to log in to the Internet. As long as somebody other than the user pays for all the required infrastructure.