Nice. However, I object to the "edit .emacs" part. I found out that most of the things that were in my .emacs could be set via M-x customize. I don't see the point of editing the configuration file instead of using the configuration interface, in particular when one addresses new users.
It depends. Usually configuration interfaces are made for two reasons: to be more "user-friendly" and to reduce the possibility of erroneous input that might confuse the parser. In this case, the emacs config interface is (arguably), not "user friendly", and emacs is usually forgiving of malformed input (it may stop loading your config, but it won't crash and it will tell you how to debug it).
