There is no such thing as an average consumer. There are power users who use a bunch of little Windows-only shareware applications, who would truly be in for some pain as they had to relearn everything if they switched to Linux, and then there are people who just use Firefox, who would hardly notice the difference.
Why would you lose files because you switch to Linux? When I switched I just put my old windows hard drive in my computer and copied them - which is the same thing I would have done with a new Windows installation.
I don't know if that's still possible. That was in the FAT32 days. But I'm sure that it's still possible to transfer files from one computer to another.
