On the other hand, if I want to show someone the "good parts" of vim, I try to show them something they can't do in another editor, rather than something that they can do (arrow keys). Even if I 100% agree that arrow keys are a worse experience, it's just not as convincing as something that can't be done outside of vim.
At least in my experience.
I've recently taken this approach to emacs and org-mode. I'm a long-time vim user with a super-optimized vimrc, so I know what productivity feels like. I threw in spacemacs to reduce the learning curve, but I still was initially much less productive with org-mode and emacs than with markdown and vim for my TODO lists.
Now, after using org and emacs for three weeks, I'm at the point where several of the amazing features that I had heard about are in my bag of tricks, and it feels awesome! But I've barely tweaked my .spacemacs file, have only learned a bit of org, and am sure that I am nowhere near peak comfort/productivity/flow. But if I had tried to learn all of the things that I know are cool about org-mode, emacs, and spacemacs all at once, I wouldn't have gotten any work done over the past few weeks, and honestly I probably would have given up.
TL;DR: the fancy stuff is the best marketing, but it's best to start slow.
- Vim is not newbie-friendly regardless of whether you remove guioptions or not. One has to spend at least a few hours of study and practice to get comfortable with Vim. If one is forced to invest a few hours to learn an editor, one might as well get rid of guioptions and follow other advice provided in sevensor's comment.
- Learning hjkl is not really pointless. hjkl and other motion commands makes Vim a unique and ergonomically a very superior experience. If one does not want to spend time learning hjkl and other motion keys, then one might as well skip learning Vim and pickup Emacs, Sublime Text or another capable editor.