"Providing a maven build will make it trivial for anyone with maven installed to build a project, making it easier to adopt clojure project in an organization that uses a lot of java."

No doubt true, but the other side is that folks like me who barely know what Maven is, and would prefer to not do a lot of Java, are put off from trying Clojure (or certain Clojure tools and libs) because it appears too married to Java tools.

Sort of like telling people that to use Rails they first need to use autoconf or something because Ruby is C under the hood.

I understand what you mean and I can respect not wanting to dig too deep into java, we are talking about two different things here I think development and deployment. autoconf is great for someone who just wants to install something from source as simple as possible, it is also consistent across projects, making it a nobrainer to install with. I would love to have a simpler environment in clojure, it not even trivial to start the repl.