the way interfaces should be

When I was eleven or so, my dad flew overseas for a week over the summer to visit his family. Since my mom had a full time job, our grandmother (her mom) stayed with my sister and I during the day. Though we spent most of our time riding bikes with our friends down the street, we would come inside for lunch and to spend time with Grandma. We had bought our first computer with Windows, so my sister and I spent hours playing solitaire and minesweeper on it. Grandma had always played card games with us, so we thought it would be fun to show her how to play on the computer. We didn't realize that simply understanding how to use a mouse would be so difficult, since we had been using them for years. A simple game of solitaire became impossible for grandma, since the interface was so difficult to learn. Since then, I've been pretty interested in movement away from interface-based computing. Touchscreens seemed to be a step in the right direction, but I couldn't fathom what the user experience would be like with even less interface. Until last year. Rich and I were sitting on opposite sides of his apartment, each teetering on top of a precariously stacked pile of furniture, trying to get the best wireless signal possible. Rich happened upon a reference to Jef Raskin and began reading. We eventually started learning about Archie, a much more human-friendly interface that the creator of the Apple Macintosh had been working on just prior to his death. The core principles made so much sense, and I couldn't help but think about how important and appealing accessibility can be, in everything from architecture to web design. Just last week, I ran into a video that shows how interface has nearly been eliminated:

How cool is that?! And it just dawned on me that this should be the direction we move towards - away from the agony of constantly having to learn and re-learn how to interact with your computer. I mean, if computers are to be such a help, shouldn't they be intuitive enough that Grandma can play solitaire without having to learn how to interact with a computer first?