Yes, they do seem aimed at geeks, at least to some extent. I used to be kind of a geek myself, but these days I'm totally focused on what I'm trying to do with computers, not on the operating system that makes the resources of the computer available to me.
On the other hand, Microsoft is such a royal pain, between their forced obsolescence and constant pick-pocketing. My company uses Linux on our servers, and all our analytical software is written to compile for a Linux target.
Unfortunately I am constrained to use Windows MFC for developing new algorithms because it's the only GUI I know. I'm not dogmatically against learning a new one, but I only want to learn one. Linux people seem to think that everyone should know multiple distros, multiple desktops, multiple application frameworks, etc. I don't have time to learn a bunch of them before settling on the one that is "the best." I wasted about six months diving into Qt before figuring out that it is a bloated slow mess.
You don't need to learn all of them--but they do give you a choice. You said you don't like Eclipse as an IDE--try CodeLite, or Netbeans.
We don't expect people to know multiple distros, or multiple desktops. I myself know very little about Gnome (and I like it that way), and even less about Unity. I know marginally more about KDE as I used to use it. I know a lot more about Xfce, Fedora, and Red Hat (I work with and am certified in Red Hat).
The point is not to know everything--you can't--but to be able to make that choice as to what you do like and can work with. You don't get that choice with other OSes.