Not to contradict your point, but this board should be easy to assemble as a first project with an investment in <$20 of soldering equipment and supplies. So I'd encourage anyone who's interested in this but new to electronics to head over to sparkfun and just dive in and see how you like it.
Easy? Not so... this is not a beginner's kit, there are surface mount components, and if this is your first time soldering, it's gonna be a rough day.
Sparkfun does a really good job of making their kits easy. If you look closely at them, the boards that require diodes and electrolytic capacitors have a picture printed on the pcb that make it really obvious what the polarity is. The gertboard pcb doesn't have any of these. If you solder a led backwards, you're SOL. So if you haven't seen a diode or led before, you probably shouldn't pick the gertboard as a first project.
You can buy the arduino as a kit, but most people who are just starting out with electronics will get one prebuilt so they don't accidentally stick their atmega chip in backwards.
I don't see anything but through-hole components here, and I don't think anyone would encourage a beginner to dive into a surface mounted design as their first project.
Or read the assembly manual where they teach how to solder surface mount components. There's a bunch of resistors & capacitors all over the board that happen to be surface mount.
