I'm inclined to agree with you. When teaching someone programming, there's something comforting about telling them they can just open up a command prompt and type "python" (or irb, perl, etc) and start programming.
I recently wrote a short Ruby program to help my not-computer-literate-at-all mother automate a task that would've taken hours and hours to do manually. She's barely comfortable using GUI programs, but because Ruby was already installed and I was able to give her clear directions she was able to run the program in Terminal.app without much trouble. It would've been frustrating as hell to remotely get her set up with homebrew (or whatever the new hotness is in package managers nowawadays), install the right version of Ruby, fix any $PATH shenanigans, etc.
(There was still some trickiness because her included version of Ruby was super old and couldn't install gems because it used an old version of SSL/TLS, but we were able to figure out a workaround)
I recently wrote a short Ruby program to help my not-computer-literate-at-all mother automate a task that would've taken hours and hours to do manually. She's barely comfortable using GUI programs, but because Ruby was already installed and I was able to give her clear directions she was able to run the program in Terminal.app without much trouble. It would've been frustrating as hell to remotely get her set up with homebrew (or whatever the new hotness is in package managers nowawadays), install the right version of Ruby, fix any $PATH shenanigans, etc.
(There was still some trickiness because her included version of Ruby was super old and couldn't install gems because it used an old version of SSL/TLS, but we were able to figure out a workaround)