[wynand]

New Mac user here (I've had mine for less than 12 hours now). Caveats upfront: I'm a long-time Ubuntu user and I'm a programmer, so I'm not exactly a parental-class user.

The most confusing thing for me was to get my Mac onto our university WPA2 enterprise network. It is actually impossible to configure Mac OS 10.7 for this (at least via a GUI). After an hour, I realized I could use the .mobileconfig file for the iPad/iPhone (on our network) to set up a profile for my Mac and then things went smoothly. This was annoying to be sure and I'm not sure what benefit derives from this removed functionality (since 10.6 can do this).

But other than that, I've had a blast of a day. Everything else has been fairly discoverable and I figured out the gestures very quickly. In contrast to some of the complaints, I like the reversed scrolling and I like the way that Mission Control works.

I'm certain that if I were to give this machine to my parents, they would be fine. Perhaps I would disable Mission Control but otherwise I cannot foresee stumbling blocks.