I think this is a great idea, especially if built into a “who is this for?” section. I think we’re scared of turning people off, but a little bit of clarity up front on what challenges you might face as an adopter would be great, especially if it’s coupled with links to resources for dealing with those challenges.
I don’t think Ember should be “experts-only”, or be cryptic about what skills you need to have as an Ember dev. At the same time, if you’re new to node, npm, bower, CLI tools, QUnit, testem, phantomjs, git, and MVC concepts, you should be prepared to start learning those things. In 2015, you need them (or similar) for just about any approach you take to web development. As for OSes, it’s not just this ecosystem that’s not optimized for Windows- it’s pretty much all of modern JS development. Angular/Yeoman has the same problems.
So, perhaps the solution isn’t that the Ember guides need to hand-hold this process as much as we need a better source for teaching concepts like CLIs and package management to people who just finished “Teach Yourself Javascript Level 2” and want to start using a framework. I agree there’s a serious gap there, I think there’s just an open question of how much of that is “in scope” for the Ember guides.