This may be a little bit ridiculous, after all, there are wordpress.com, blogger and tumblr. But the sad fact is, I have so far been unable to provide my non-technical friends and family with blogs. Tumblr (maybe the best bet) turned out to be too slow and erratic when I evaluated their interface, blogger is ugly and has mandatory Blogger-Branding (I think), and Wordpress.com has intransparent pricing (I can't figure out how much they cost from their homepage). Furthermore, Wordpress is based on PHP - I could never figure out how to properly host multiple WP blogs on my debian server, and in general I don't trust PHP so hosting it myself makes me feel very uneasy.
For those reasons I plan to migrate my blogs to Octopress/Jekyll, which is of course not an option for non-techie people. But it made me think, maybe a similarly clean interface could be presented to non-techies anyway (kind of like Jekyll without the command line). The problem with existing blog engines seems to be that they are overloaded with Ajax and features.