Exactly. I'm an academic who uses and promotes git (for research, analysis, and writing). My colleague and I are building a markdown editor with git support. We're going for exactly what you describe. git is abstracted from the user and they just provide GitHub credentials to have everything stored in a repo.

Non programming types use the gui and programming types can directly interact with the repo.

See (super early version) here: https://github.com/yoavram/markx