In reply to Joe.

I'm not debating whether or not WP is easy to set up for the average user, just observing that it seems a little shortsighted to claim this is in any way due to a lack of backups, spam control and/or caching in core.

If those were part of core, you'd see as many or more people complaining (including myself) that I was bound to those features. Backups? I run those on the server, why would I want WP doing that? Caching? Same thing.