Your comparison to physical systems is spot on. There are very few physical devices that are malleable in this sense. We'd be better off advocating for more open source, better development tools, and new programming paradigms or languages designed to help novices learn. However, we are overdue for a revolution in how computers are programmed. Editing text on a screen is straightforward and fairly universal but we should be trying to take advantage of cheaper and more widely available user interface devices to improve how we translate thoughts into programs.