Thing is, people can't answer those questions honestly, because they're terrible at gauging their own levels of ability.

The KDE setup wizard thing is the KDE project's way of saying "We cannot agree on a set of sane defaults for our desktop", instead giving people environments that are bad ripoffs of existing environments. What they SHOULD do is go, "This is KDE! Hear it roar!"

If you're going to pretend to be Windows/Mac OS/CDE, you'd better do it with high fidelity, because there's nothing more confusing than something that says it's like Windows but then isn't. Which is of course what happens, because the only thing that's just like Windows is, well, Windows.

Mac OS X does no such thing, and neither does Windows XP. Having installed both of those recently (and having had cause to marvel at the simplicity of the OS X installation on an admittedly more predictable hardware platform) I can speak with a little authority. OS X just does localisation/personalisation, runs a registration wizard, nags you about a .mac account, and that's it. XP does activation, a little personalisation/localisation, and then you're done. Both have tutorial things. Neither run automatically (although they both show you them at first log in).