It occurs to me that the person who makes revision control easy in the same way that social websites made having your own website easy will also make a billion dollars.

Hell yeah. I have successfully explained to a bunch of not-very-technical managers why they would want version control: "Have you ever spent three days editing the wrong version of a document?" Wide eyes, all slowly nod. Once they understood what it was for, they would have crawled across broken glass for version control. (And since we were using ClearCase, they did pretty much that!)

"Track changes" in Word solves a little of the problem from the other end.