I'd actually benefit a lot from Linus being more listened to. After all, he gets pissed when desktops remove features coders need to be productive, and I'm a coder. Should Linus have written git to be useful by non-techies? It wouldn't have been powerful enough to compete with CVS and Subversion and the like and many of us would still be stuck on centralized version control. Making stuff for the general public only is all well and good, but it's not all that's out there. In fact, it is kind of anti-open source since open source is all about being able to adapt software to your needs, and our desktops now are ripping out all the options waving the flag of needing to appeal to the general public.
Git having a horrible interface is orthogonal to it being a successful DVCS. In fact, I'm quite convinced that it's precisely due to the article's subject, cult of personality of Linus, that git took off.
Mercurial is a good example of a powerful DVCS (it can do everything git can) and yet a sane user interface that is easier to teach. Almost nobody "non-techie" that I know about learns git's command line. It's a horrible mess! Instead they rely on GUIs (Git Tower, gitk) or WUIs (Github). But almost anyone can learn hg's command line, since they go through great pains to make sure they pick user-facing names and words and concepts that map to familiar ideas.
A thousand times this. Linus may be amazing at the low level, but he absolutely SUCKS at user interfaces. Git's CLI is a prime example of this.
We all have our strengths and weaknesses. It takes strength of character to acknowledge where you're weak, and it takes strength of will to follow only the good examples of those we admire.
At my current job we have MRI readers, almost all of them who come from medical backgrounds (neurologists, radiologists, the odd obstetrician here and there) and we have them use the command line all the while. We're transitioning them into using hg for some things, and they seem comfortable with it.
