Disagree, tried to get my brother to learn Rails using this tutorial and got stuck configuring Git and his remote Github repository. It introduces waaaaay too much information that a beginner doesn't really care about.

Git repositories, test driven development, etc are all things a beginner doesn't care about and doesn't really need to know about when starting out.

I recommend Michael Hartl's excellent book. For some beginners, "Learn Ruby on Rails" is a good "prequel." Not everyone is ready for Hartl's tutorial, especially if they've had little programming or web development experience.

I disagree. The concept of Railstutorial is to show how industrial strength rails programming is done (heck, Michael even adds indices to enforce uniqueness of the database level), so for an absolute beginner it is much better to do some ruby first (Pine's learn to program is best imo) and start with a rails book that does not bombast you with rspec and cucumber.

railstutorial was a great way for me to learn rails, and I had experience with several other languages, git, and knew a bit of ruby.

It introduces way too much for a pure beginner who knows little-to-no programming trying to get started. That said, I really don't think someone brand new to coding should learn RoR straight away.