Very well said, Bert64. You've perfectly delineated what I was trying to say, but with much better detail. Thank you!
Hopefully, someone involved with the Pi will read your comments, and "make it so!"
Ideally, a pre-programmed SD card should also be available, so one need only buy it, connect it, and power it up to see a window on the desktop with:
READY.
_
(Or some other such prompt!)
As someone else pointed out, make a default, hard-coded, "ROM"-based OS for the Pi, which cannot be "broken" by inexperienced users "PEEK"-ing and "POKE"-ing around the system... like the computers we both grew up with!
For me, it was a VIC 20, then a C64. I was not just into "hacking" the software, I was also into building and modifying the hardware! I had built a speech synthesizer board around the SPO256 chip for my Commie64, and had a blast making that thing say all kinds of crazy stuff. ;) I also built a relay box to control lights! (A 4-channel "Light-o-Rama".) Imagine if there were similar things for the Pi?