Much of this article focuses on the writing system, but it's possible to learn to converse in a language without being literate in it. It's a fallacy to say that Chinese is "hard" because it is written with characters (and besides, there's always romanisation via Pinyin).

I'm glad it made sure to state that difficulty is relative in language - the Chinese learn their languages just fine afterall.

I don't think tone is as big of a problem as it's made out to be. As a foreiger who studies Mandarin I've found that with enough listening I began to pick out the tones well (although I still can't reproduce them as acurately!).

Unfortunately there is a lot of misinformation surrounding Chinese. A good book mentioned in the bibliography is The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy by John DeFrancis.