Gnome shell is not aimed at technical users. It's simplified or removed many features which were present in Gnome 2, as well as a lot of customization. The tagline, "Made of easy", and the usability testing they've done suggest that Gnome 3 is trying to be a general purpose environment that anyone can use.
They may think so, but the gnome guys imo (no offense) are a bit too technical to really understand the needs of non-technical end users. From what I've seen so far of gnome3 it seems very confusing.
