While that's true, the orthogonal skills can sometimes make the real work easier. Knowing even a small amount of VBA could save you hours in Excel. Knowing a small amount of Python could let you rename every mp3 file on your hard drive in 5 minutes. When you remove access to the low levels of the computer, you remove a lot of the ability to solve one-off problems. There are people who put panels inside panels on WinForms just to get a border color other than black, because they aren't aware they can override Panel.OnPaint. Having only high-level access may make easy things easier, but it can also make hard things much harder.<p>There was a great submission here recently called "Programming as a super power" (<a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/alfredth/archive/2010/01/20/programming-as-a-super-power.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://blogs.msdn.com/alfredth/archive/2010/01/20/programmin...</a>), where the author said that "there are more programs that should be written than professional programmers can ever write." This could be abstracted to "there are more things that should be done at a low level than superusers can ever do." So if the iPad doesn't <i>let</i> you do things at a low level, there will be negative consequences.