How do you move photos from Alice's computer to Bob's computer? "Check out these"? With the concept of files, you can move photos/music/whatever in a number of ways - thumb drive, network shares, cloud. If you only work through 'photo manager' applications, how do you do it? What if the creators of the photo manager didn't want to support thumb drives? What if the way the photo managers on the different devices use different ways of referring to the photos?

I think 'regular' users have plenty of use for understanding the filesystem. I also think that it's okay to have some degree of expectation for the user - dumbing it down for the lowest common denominator is harmful (look at politics!). What do you really gain by alienating the power users?