Linux is actually pretty easy, its just that people are so used to windows so people expect windows-lie behaviour and it doesn't work like windows so therefore they think its hard
No it's not. A lot of it is getting there, but there are still to this day things where Linux just falls down on usability. And I say this as someone who's been using Linux (and, until this year, *Slackware* Linux) as his primary OS since the mid-90s, so it's not just that I'm dumb and can't figure things out.
Quick example: The other day, I needed do format a USB drive because there was something messed up with its filesystem and it thought it has less memory than it actually does. I'm running Ubuntu now, so I assumed that there was a nice easy Gnome way to do it.
Yeah, there's not.
I right clicked on the drive, and I thoroughly searched the Nautilus menus and there wasn't a "Format" option. Eventually I gave up and googled it...and learned that the only way to do it is apparently to drop to a shell and run fdisk and mkfs.vfat by hand.
Even if you dispute my central premise that Aunt Tilly can't handle shell commands, you've got to at least grant me that forcing Aunt Tilly to handle shell commands where a one-character typo (e.g., /dev/sda instead of /dev/sdi) could completely wipe out her hard drive is not particularly user friendly.
It's a little thing, but Linux is riddled with these little examples where the user is tooling along happily with Gnome wrapping them in a nice warm blanket of user friendliness and then they suddenly get kicked in the balls by the underlying Linux way of doing things when they have to set up slightly weird hardware or configure a program that doesn't have a nice graphical editor for its config file.
It's small stuff, yeah, but good user interface design is all about sweating the small stuff. Apple gets that. Microsoft doesn't, really, but they're close enough for most people. The open source community, for the most part, doesn't. Certainly some do, but for every coder out there who does there are ten going "So? What's so hard about fdisk and mkfs? People should learn to use the shell anyway, it's way more powerful." And they're the more prolific coders.
I suppose then we should make only one type of car per manufacturer so the consumer doesn't get confused, or one computer per manufacturer
For years, GM, Ford, and Chrysler have been making multiple lines with basically the same car in them. E.g., the old GMC Safari van was the exact same vehicle as the Chevrolet Astro, just with different chrome slapped on the front. If you've been listening to the news lately, you may have heard that one of the plans the Big Three have to rescue themselves is to knock that shit off and simplify their car lines.
An example from my own personal experience: I was looking to replace my car and decided I wanted a hybrid. I went down to the Honda dealership to test drive the civic hybrid and the dealer started trying to sell me the non-hybrid civic since it was cheaper and he thought I'd be more likely to buy that day for a lower price. But if you took away my base "I want a hybrid", then my choice went from 'Civic vs Prius' to 'All of the small four-door cars currently on the market'.
Long story short, I bought a Prius.
Also, for a while, Apple had the Macintosh Performa, the Macintosh Centris, the Macintosh Quadra, the Macintosh Powerbook, the Macintosh LC, the Apple Workgroup Servers, the Color Classic, and probably a few others I'm forgetting, all being sold at the same time, all with a variety of different model numbers and configurations, some of which were the same machine internally but with different nameplates on the front for different markets. One of the big changes Steve Jobs made when he came back was to simplify that down to: iMac/Powermac, iBook/Powerbook (and then later iMac/Mac Pro, MacBook/MacBook Pro). Simplifying the line increased the overall Mac sales. People could just choose between the consumer and pro model, laptop or desktop. They didn't have to choose between high-end, lower-high-end, midrange, upper-low-end, low-end, in desktop, laptop, or tower configurations, or maybe the Classic line if they wanted a monitor built in, etc.
There was a great show on RadioLab about this subject the other day where it's explained a lot more eloquently than I can, so I'm going to link you to there and stop rambling.
http://blogs.wnyc.org/radiolab/2008/11/18/choice/