I raised the point in comments above, but there is a big different between creating a new page from scratch and using a simple form to create a templated page. WordPress (or any blogging tool) doesn't make you build your blog post as a page draggin modules onto it...they give you a special admin page where you just fill in the title and body text and click publish...what could be simpler?
In-context editing does work great for many use cases, but it doesn't work well for some. Think about when you need to create a slightly interactive web page...not just a simple static one. You'd like one section of the page to fade in/out when the user hovers over an image for instance...I haven't seen anyone pull off an in-context UI that makes that easy but I've seen some great form based UI's that make that 30 secs work for a non-technical user.
Check out the Carrington Build WordPress plugin (no affiliation) for a decent example of providing users with a very simple admin page builder drag and drop layout tool.
I do wholeheartedly agree that very few CMS tools have an awesome UI for business users...maybe you can change that.
Administration can be no more than filling out forms, uploading images, etc, etc. No plugins, no DBs, no hosting, no nuthin'.