Ah ok, I still don't see there being any barrier at all,
I bought my son a ZX Spectrum. You can still buy all the fantastic home computers on ebay etc etc.
Or, there are web based spectrum etc emulators out there where you can just write code and run it.
I'd agree though, it'd be nice to make sure kids can get access to the dev environment that lets them play quickly and easily.
It'd be cool to have something better on netbooks, like the eee. I don't know if there are any good learning programming tools included, but there definitely should be.
On any Mac said kid could do:
$ python
>>> while True:
>>> print "JENNY HAS COOTIES!"
How many of the other folks here started out just as described in this article: namely, writing silly little BASIC programs for early Commodore, Apple, or DOS systems?
There are a handful of projects aimed at just this niche (Scratch and Greenfoot, for example) but none of them come standard on any new system. That lack of immediate availability means that kids have to actively seek out the tools + have the ability/privileges to install new software before they can even start experimenting with something like this: