As a software developer and general technologist, I can safely say that the average person knows far more about piracy than I do.
I constantly hear my non-techincal peers, who otherwise claim to know nothing about computers, always talking about the latest program they've installed to get free media. It's all over my head, but they get along just fine.
The same would happen under SOPA. The non-technical folks will just install "DNS Extender Pro" to get their media fix, and full DNS access is restored. They won't know how or why it works, but that doesn't matter.
Exactly this, it's really all about how strong your motive is combined with as you say people will build tools that make things easier.
Let's assume that the only way to pirate content was to install a built from scratch version of Linux and use some command line tools to download what you want, you would have millions of visitors to kernel.org in a fairly short time (in fact I successfully compiled my own kernel years ago knowing almost nothing about Linux).
A good example of this was when I worked for an IT outsourcing company that hired allot of not very technical people to work on it's technical support desk.
There were various fixes for common problems that in fact required quite complex solutions, however most of the staff were still able to carry these out because there was either a script available that simply did the action or there was a set of precise written guides on how to do said actions.
So if customer calls with problem X then do steps A , B , C.
Whether or not you understand these steps only becomes important when there is a problem or when you need to do something non-standard. Plus most non technical people will know at lest one semi technical person who they can enlist to help them.
From the point of view of finding a website there isn't really a lot of perceived difference between typing "amazon.com" into google or typing it into the address bar. There is however a large difference perceived between paying for something and not.
I constantly hear my non-techincal peers, who otherwise claim to know nothing about computers, always talking about the latest program they've installed to get free media. It's all over my head, but they get along just fine.
The same would happen under SOPA. The non-technical folks will just install "DNS Extender Pro" to get their media fix, and full DNS access is restored. They won't know how or why it works, but that doesn't matter.