Anecdotally, completely wrong. I set my tech phobic father up on Ubuntu 6 or 7 years ago. He doesn't need to care what a package manager is, because he doesn't install anything, except for security updates when prompted. He uses the browser, abiword, and gnumeric, and is totally fine with that setup. A couple of years back he bought a new printer, plugged it in, and the system walked him through configuring it automatically.