The File System is the New Command Line
...which is to say for geeks only. Normal people need not apply.
I tell my beginner computing students that a computer is an environment. These are the sort of students who are starting from first principles and need a couple of hours playing solitaire to get a handle on mouse control, you understand. The thing about an environment, I say, is that to learn how to operate in it, you must be immersed in that environment, you must experiment and play, see what works and what doesn't. You have to try everything to find out what the rules are.
Babies start out this way. They don't understand gravity or how it works but eventually, through trial and error, they will begin to get a grip on the rules and, at some point, be able to walk, run and catch a ball with no problem. In the same way, the longer you use a computer and the more things you try, the simpler and easier it becomes, even to do new things (as long as they follow the same rules).
However, there is still a steep learning curve and this is because computers don't follow the same rules that we do. We grew up in a physical world where objects are arranged spatially and obey Newton's laws. Millions of years of evolution has tasked our brains with operating effectively in this world.
A computer? They operate like a complicated, recursive filing cabinet you can only access remotely with a weird pointing device. The idea of filing things in drawers has only been around a few hundred years. Our brains might be able to do it but they're not programmed for it at a fundamental level.
The point is that to consider a computer to be intuitive and easy, you have to have a certain mind set - organised, logical and able to consider a 2D screen to be a faux 3D environment with overlapping windows. That's not nearly intuitive enough, though, and it excludes too many people.
So, what do you need for anyone to consider a computer to be intuitive? Well, it needs to mirror the real world, to be arranged spatially and respond to physics. It also needs to mirror how we think, to focus on one task at a time and have the work and the tools available in the same place.
And this is the point where you probably figure out where I'm going.
On an iPhone and iPad you don't go into a sub-folder inside a folder inside a folder inside your home folder to find what you want - you just go right or left. You don't have to run software and then find the file you want - they're kept together in the same place. And you don't have to shuffle different tasks and windows around because you focus on only one task at a time.
It works how we work and how the world works, and it's why a two year old child can use an iPhone.
But no file system? No multi-tasking? It's pretty scary stuff if you're a geek. We can think in terms of filing cabinets and enjoy having all that control (I don't let iTunes manage my music files for me, for example).
But you know what? We used to love the command line, too.