I'm a noob, and I LOVE this phone. Here's why I picked it:
I wanted more power and possibilities.
There is no better hardware out there.
The OS is less polished but it still works, and you can tweak it as much as you want.
The community is working very hard night and day to make sure you can squeeze every last drop of usability out of this device.
You can send free texts and stuff.
You can use it with T-Mobile pay-as-you-go.
You don't need to buy a data plan.
You can give feedback directly to the people that are making the application that you like.

And so on. You don't have to be a programmer to do any of that stuff.