Brew is not consumer friendly at all. My parents (in their 60's) own a mac that I bought for them. It was a great decision for me as I barely have to support them for technical problems. I only get questions on how to do something. If I was to try and explain brew to them it would be a disaster. Explaining the Mac App Store is far easier.
Brew is not even tech-person friendly. I'm comfortable with the command line and I had a ton of problems getting cask to work. I LOVE the idea and I will use it every time I setup a computer, but there's so many issues to work out. Mainly, some apps not updating correctly, the storage of app versions in cask, settings, licensing. It's a mess.
I really hope it gets better. I'd contribute if I was knowledgeable enough to do so.
Be aware that Homebrew Cask [1], which your comment is referring to, is a separate project being built on top of Homebrew ("brew") [2] and it currently has a number of shortcomings that are independent of anything to do with Homebrew itself.
