> I think to your average person markdown looks like a step down from WYSiWYG

I agree. When I worked for a company that mostly sold custom websites to smallish companies, our sales guy would show his marks the TinyMCE interface and they loved it. I reckon we sold a lot of websites to people who believed we were giving them the ability to manage their own content easily.

Even better, we were able to generate more revenue when those people invariably messed up their content and needed us to fix it. So really it's win-win.