The magic is in the magician, not the wand.

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And it's damn hard to come by phoenix feathers these days anyway ...

There are a couple of shops in Diagon Alley that stock them.

Yes, often especially business users are always absolutely amazed by "the console" (especially multiple ones running "something" concurrently, with semi-transparent background).
Which brings me to the question "how far are we from "normal" users?".
Btw. taught a friend of mine Linux and of course "the console" for ~30 hours (aggregated), but he lost interest and we have therefore probably lost a follower => my fault, I should probably have started with the opposite like 3D-desktop, video/audio transcoding, etc... . Will do better the next time... .

All my friends and family run Linux anyway so no they are amazed at all.

My relatives who are old enough to remember comment that Linux is too DOSSY, as in DOS, as in command line. Once you learn the command line it's much faster than a mouse and GUI. Find me a GUI text editor that will navigate a file by line# and position. Kate actually might.

But I don't need to worry about anyone wanting to use my laptop, because they can't. If anyone "does" ask, I just run tail -f -n 50 /var/log/messages, maximize the terminal, and hand them the machine.

I get that expression that belies a combination of nausea and fear, and not in a good way. It reminds me of one of my fellow students years ago. She had dial-up Internet. But a lot of people did then.

So, she would call me for help doing something online, like opening an email account. So, I'd say, "Yeah, click the blue button that says "OK". Then she'd hang up, connect to the Internet, and get to another page. Then she'd disconnect, call me back, and ask me what she should do on "that" page!

This could go on for hours. And when she clicked the mouse, she always got it into position, took her hands off it, and clicked the button with the eraser tip on a pencil. I said, "You could just use your finger."

She said, "But then it moves and the click doesn't work!" So, I figured there was less chance of her becoming self-sufficient than me having lunch with President Kennedy at the top of the World Trade Center

On average their more impresd in a GUI while firing up a term &c, having stuff flash up and twinkle from a keyboard faster than a speeding clickety click... plus there's always tty1-6. :D/

this (and some other comments) remind me of my pet rant:
99% of all people i come across who professionally use a computer (so not coding or anything, just using. usually just one application pertaining to their business), use it in the manner described above.
it always makes me want to shout: "you could have just pressed Enter there!!! Everything you did in the last 5 minutes, i could've done in one! move over and just tell me what to do! gahhhh!"

honestly i don't understand how someone doing the same things day by day doesn't come up with some strategies - in most cases, keyboard instead of mouse - to economize the workflow.

so in a way i'm answering the OP with an opposite: i am amazed at some people who do NOT use the terminal...

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