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CronoDAS comments on More intuitive programming languages - Less Wrong Discussion
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A related question: how much would a beginner have to study before being able to write Tetris? As I said, I graduated with a degree in computer engineering without being able to code Tetris, because I have no idea how to write anything except console programs that use cin and cout to do all the input/output work. "Draw something on the screen, and have it move when someone presses a key" would seem to be a fundamental task in computer programming, but apparently it's some kind of super-advanced topic. :P
The focus on cin / cout as opposed to GUI is probably because cin is simple and always works the same way (mostly because nobody uses it, no need for a zillion libraries), whereas there are a lot of very different GUI libraries with different ways of doing things; learning one of those would take time and not help you use another one much.
If you want to learn yow to make a GUI you can probably find a "hello world" example for your language/os of choice and just copy-paste the code and then adjust it to suit your needs.
Yeah... everything is in libraries these days and the libraries are all incompatible with each other. :(
It's not as hard as it might sound. Modern languages have nice libraries and frameworks that make input and basic graphics very easy. Here's a tutorial for Slick (a Java-based 2D game framework) that walks you through how to do exactly what you ask: http://slick.cokeandcode.com/wiki/doku.php?id=01_-_a_basic_slick_game
Here's a tutorial for how to make Tetris: http://slick.cokeandcode.com/wiki/doku.php?id=02_-_slickblocks
I'm sure similar things exist for C++, especially since it's the most popular language for making games in.
edit: If you want to actually follow one of the above tutorials, see this setup info first: http://slick.cokeandcode.com/wiki/doku.php?id=getting_started_and_setup
Probably not too long. I wrote (a crappy version of) Breakout in my second semester of high-school programming, and that was using Pascal plus some homebrewed x86 assembler for the graphics (both of which were a nightmare that I wouldn't recommend to anyone), so simple games clearly don't require any deep knowledge of the discipline; if you've got a computer-engineering background already and you're working with a modern graphics library, I'd call it a couple weeks of casual study. Less if you're using a game-specific framework, but those skills don't usually transfer well to other things.