I can see the same path for an HTML/CSS beginner.
As I learned I wrote a lot of code I'm not too proud of, looking back on it. But I grew to learn and love Javascript and I honestly have jQuery to thank for that.
Of course the problem with that is the code you ARE proud of rapidly becomes the kind you aren't proud of as you learn more.
Actually a bit is being kind. It's rare to come across a site not using jQuery. I write a fair few personal scraping scripts and it's very rare I actually have to add jQuery.
Actually, in many ways I think learning jQuery before learning vanilla javascript can be an advantage. jQuery is heavy on functional programming techniques, list comprehensions, and such-like. As long as you learn well and don't cut corners I don't see any problems with "learning jQuery" on its own.
jQuery has two big benefits for me: cutting down on verbosity a bit, and on making a cross-browser solution possible. For the latter various polyfills solve the problem effectively, but the verbosity problem still remains.
The handwritten code I used to use for element detection was a thing of evil, that kept on getting cut-and-pasted around because it worked.
The conciseness and cleanness of using jQuery was a welcome change.
I entirely agree about the jQuery analogy. There is going to be a huge Bootstrap ecosystem - again similar to WordPress as well as jQuery. It's kind of a problem for the web when this happens, in that it creates the kind of fragmentation the web should ideally avoid, but it's a reality nonetheless that technologies like this are going to be two steps ahead of the standards.
Just seeing the various Bootstrap themes sites is exciting. When I've looked for themes in the past, there are very few focusing on rich HTML5 apps. Mostly just static websites and WordPress stuff. That's just one area which has changed since Bootstrap, as it's now possible to build a theme around standard higher-level constructs.
Just yesterday, Joomla, the next largest CMS behind WordPress, launched a latest version, entirely built with Bootstrap: http://joomla.org/3/
That's a not-insignificant % of the web right there that's moving to Bootstrap.
EDIT a good example: If you wanted to rebuild hacker news, would you start with bootstrap? I wouldn't