I think Drew is on the right track. Lets not over react to a gut reaction to someone who may not have ever been an emacs user even if we did promote the arrow keys over C-n/C-p.
Emacs has an audience/user base, but to believe that equals the set of all people who use editors is a mistake. Some people just want a very simple editor which is easy to use and only does basic editing - there are plenty of these editors. These users are unlikely to ever enjoy emacs. Doing your shopping in a formula 1 car is never going to work.
Those who need/want a more powerful editor are unlikely to be put off by the tutorial. This doesn't mean we can't improve the tutorial. Only want to emphasise that there is no way to please everyone and we really need to focus on the 'real' audience, those who will benefit from what emacs can offer over things like nano, gedit, textedit etc.
tim