Computers. Why do they cause such angst?

This essay, over at American Digest humorously catalogs the issues with today’s operating systems and software packages. The conclusion is that what consumers really want is an appliance, not this crazy monstrosity that is a modern computer. In the comments, I mentioned Stephenson’s essay In the Beginning Was the Command Line Interface, but this was meant more to poke the various Mac fanboys in the comments.
But coming back later, I noticed that someone said that the history of computers is not really relevant, and someone else complained that computers act like jack-of-all-trades. That woke me up like a slap in the face. I did not even flinch at the comment saying that Linux should provide a warranty (which only goes to show that people don’t understand what the open-source development model is; Eric S. Raymond’s essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar explains this idea better than I could). I think that the history of computers is fundamental to understanding the problem with the personal computer. Of course a computer does so much! Remember that the digital computer was designed, to borrow a metaphor from Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, along the lines of a pipe-organ, which can be reconfigured to make many types of sounds. Think of the incredible capacity for logic bound up in the theories behind computer science! The history of computers reveals that many false assumptions are made about how these things work, and I think that we would be foolish to ignore at least 40 years (not twenty) of computer history (not just of personal computers).
For the orignal poster’s problem, I think that some compromise between a modern cellphone interface and the power of a personal computer will emerge, that will deal with all the distractions and cruft of the current PC. Maybe I will design this, if I ever stop fooling around blogging, finish my college applications, and get to work designing this new interface while working on my computer science major. For everyone else, the history of computers is important for fixing the faulty metaphors of our current computer interfaces.
Anyway, I should get ready for relatives, and I seem to have lost my train of thought somewhere in this post. I hope you can see through this muddle to the point that seemed so clear and shining in my head only minutes ago.