Not always a good thing
Very interesting article, and I look forward to read the rest of the series!
I see what you mean about new people having to learn the ropes 'somehow' and you're right of course, nobody is born an admin.
First, let me tell you what my situation is: I am employed by a large multi-national company with tens of thousands of people around the world all using computers, part of a massive AD and administered through Group policies like you talked about. The problems we are facing are badly installed software, network drives disappearing or being wrongly connected, roaming user-profiles you can only use on one PC properly, unpatched PC's which get infected with virusses, wrongly set file access rights, etc, etc... The list is endless.
So, in our case, it would be helpfull to have a couple more decent administrators and less people learning how to be one.
The vanishing of network drives got so bad that I wrote a program that my colleagues and me can use to make a personalised vbscript that we can run when needed and that will just remove badly attached drives and re-attach the ones we actually need.
Of course, the IT-services got outsourced some years ago, and since then, the situation has gradually gotten worse. People with no clue about IT inside the company making insane rules, and fresh out of school (or never having got there) outsourced admins badly implementing them.
Sorry, I feel better now. Think I'll have a drink of water and get back to work...