I used to be a gentoo devotee and a kde fanboy. However I switched to ubuntu (and therefore gnome) because it installed and worked (mostly) without complete futzing around. the move to gnome was easy. Mostly people are clicking on a button to start a program, thats the same in win/kde/gnome, just as long as someone points out the start|K|applications menu.
Once the program has started, firefox is the same in all environments, all mail programs look more or less the same (3 panes, message preview, click a message to read it). There, we've covered 90% of what people do on their computers - web browsing and email. And only an idiot couldn't find the web browser and email client in the average linux install, kde or gnome based.
