Just my opinion: If someone is willing to put in the effort to start a new website/forum aiming at the newbie crowd, it's definitely worth a shot. There's no reason not to try out new ideas. If it doesn't work, just make the domain resolve to internettablettalk and call it an interesting experiment

Other weird random comments:
- If people are willing to devote time to answering new users, why not try to start an FAQ page on the wiki. Cool rule I use for services I work on: answer it in the FAQ and then send the link, rather than just sending an e-mail/posting/etc. I know it's easier to do for work purposes
- I think the wiki is awesome, esp. for a community effort. Why not try to reorganize the front page, create sections based on difficulty, or at least try to add green/red/yellow image tags to links from the wiki for HowTos to help users get started. Yeah, I'm all talk on this one... I'm glad to have contributed 1 article to the wiki ;-)
- For the new users, I don't think it is rude to provide the general outline of the problem, point to a link, and say "by the way, searching would really help out." Add a smilie if it looks mean.
- Occasional fix-it threads would be great for the community, similar to what the Nokia guys do with maemo.org. "Lets reorg the wiki home page..." "Newby-ize articles" etc

I don't really like forums, but it's the best way to encourage communication. I think leaving technical details in the wiki is the best way to make it easier for all levels of users to get the information they need though