I concur. From my limited experience with Lua, I'd say it's a very beginner friendly language, and it's blazing fast in certain conditions. There's also an app called Codea which runs on iPad that allows beginners to code games within. It works suprisingly well, and there are a few games on the app store that are written entirely on iPad in Codea.
I don't fully understand why Lua hasn't taken over the world. Seems that a large part of it is a sort of weak ecosystem (maybe larger than it seems, but too spread out), and maybe the table thing weirds people out. People want to learn something they can use in "real life" as soon as possible, at least in my experience. But if Lua had taken over that wouldn't be a problem. Grrr.
No standard library, nor even a standard class/object model. Lua is more of a language engine than a complete language. In that capacity, it is quite a success.