Just saw your reply, but I think you're missing my point and I'm not sure if it's willful or not. If not, here it is again: The difference in experience between Word/Docs and the various text-based markup languages is not as significant as the difference that someone would have experienced going from a typewriter to something digital, whether troff or anything else. It is like trying to get someone to go from Excel -> another programming language, versus a handheld calculator and pen and paper to anything on a computer. There are differences, I'm not saying there aren't and you're being obtuse if that's how you're taking it, but the magnitude is far less.

Regarding your "don't want to be distracted", Word has had an outline mode since at least 1995 (first time I used Word). Not sure about Google Docs, but it's a perfectly fine distraction free writing environment. So that's not even a selling point for users of Word.