Would you say geohot is a concert level pianist at...typing? Maybe you could say he's at the level for actually coding.

I'd say what I'm talking about is more akin to learning scales, which most people could do with a few hours of effort.

Well, that’s in part true. You need to learn and practice your fundamentals if you want to improve your skills in a domain. In software development, learning your main tools is one of those.