Yes, but my suggestion is that the summary is confused... first the statement that these are academic people, then the fact that they are either already using latex or he is suggesting that they use latex. Quite frankly, if they can handle latex, they can surely handle the concept of revision control and something like "hg commit", "hg push" etc.

Technical writers shouldn't have a problem using technical tools, no?

I feel the same way about c / c++ software... if it doesn't come in the standard package for my system (i.e. in the repository) you can forget about getting it working on your system. The sheer mess of libraries and versions needed for this and that, never mind the build systems etc., make it impossible to get anything to compile and run.

Pick your poison... I'm a java developer, and the first applications I grab (when there are more then one available for the "problem") is one built in Java.