This is one of the reasons why ponying up the extra money for a Mac system is a good deal, you get a box, you open the box, you press the on button and you're ready to go.
Indeed. I get a little depressed thinking about the hours I've wasted on the tonymac forums looking up solutions to the problems I've having and trying random things to see if it worked.
In my experience with other OS' (Windows 3.1 -> Windows 8, Ubuntu 4 -> Ubuntu 13, half a dozen other Linux varieties), I've never been able to open the box and get to work within half an hour. There's always been some niggle. It's a bit trickier now that the dev tools are an optional download rather than a CD/setup option, but in practise I'm usually good to start working with a fresh Mac in about half an hour. With Linux there's a lot more tinkering to get it just so, and with Windows there's generally a lot more to download and configure to get it working comfortably.
Time I could've spent much more productively.