The family and friends I advise have no interest in what you mention which btw is a fine example of expanding your computer interests. They primarily want to surf the internet to find out things and learn things for personal and business purposes. Then office such as composing and printing a letter to mail. E-mail is important. 70-80% of computer buyers are like this. Photos are important for me but just so-so or nothing for the people I'm talking about. They are on a surfing curve, not a learning curve.
Do you think we have a chicken/egg thing here? People use ‘plain ole’ windows laptop to do what you outlined, or people do what you outlined because that is all that the computer will do?
2 stories. Friend of a friend, retired school teacher paid almost 3k for a (very nice) mac book 3 years ago. Never used it, now getting around to selling it. No one she knows uses macs, she just let it sit... My kids (now 17 & 14) were exposed to a mac book about 3 years ago. After 10 minutes of letting them play with it, I was convinced I had to get them one - their creativity was just turned loose by the thing.