I've worked with many first time users over 20 years and have never witnessed any of them intuitively understand either CLI or GUI, both are artificial, contrived and unique and need to be learnt. I don't essentially see one as a better choice than the other for a new user, maybe in some ways the CLI has less abstractions which can be a help, I've witnessed much confusion over the many many ways you can enact the same result using different methods in a GUI.
After having our first child 17 months ago and dealing with the headaches of breast feeding and an infant with trouble "latching," I'm no longer confident that even that is totally intuitive...
Edit: ah, his 2001 quote seems to validate my frustrations :)
Yeah, our first never figured it out at all, she was bottle fed all the way, but our second (8 months now) was latched on like five minutes after birth.
I think 'intuitively' actually means less having to think about all possible options at any moment or stage of an action. If its clear how to accomplish the next step, it is considered intuitive.
GUI are considered more intuitively because options in general are visible as menus and buttons. On a CLI adding parameters to a command can get complicated if you are halfway and forgot if it was '-l' or '-L'.
Intuitive is defined as without conscious reasoning, so no, Menus and Buttons do need you to think, take chrome, up there, top right, for starters I need to click on three horizontal lines then;
New tab
New window
What could anyone infer from the terms 'tab' or 'window' without some prior knowledge, these interfaces succeed because the cost of failure is low and the level of feedback and reward is high, so we persevere, an intuitive interface would require a whole new conceptual model of how we interact with data. No, I don't have one to show you, I am fairly certain that existing approaches will appear draconian to our children's children though :)
