I would have to agree with you, Synology for their NAS range is very intuitive for non techy people, shame the hardware underneath is a bit underpowered for what it could be. For SOHO though you could pretty much run one as the main server. Great GUI for a linux backend.
XPEnology is pretty good too though, best of both worlds when installed on to a mid end PC (thinking i5 / low end Xeon ?) not entirely legal though I suspect.
I guess the usibility is why their NAS's hold their price second hand as it can't be the power of the hardware or reletively slow network transfer rates that keep them popular. Hmm, where have we seen that before ? Apple ?