You're saying that making something more comfortable for new users is the same as marching towards a walled garden? Linux has been criticized for decades about its inaccessibility to the masses. I'm about as hardcore a Linux guy as they come, and were it not for these sort of improvements, I'm not sure my wife and kids would have been willing to use Linux on all of our home computers. And as much as some people complain about the GPL license, it has been remarkably useful in keeping Linux free from corporate take over.