My girlfriend put it like this:
Wordpress has one suit hanging on a door with a bunch of dangles and clip-ons you can add to it to make it snazzy-er.
EE has an 800 square foot walk-in wardrobe with an almost limitless possibility to wear something different every day for the rest of the milenia.
Me elaborating:
Essentially, you can turn EE into a Scheduling app for a contractor. An online shop, a time managment / employee clock in clock out app for a small business. It can be a simple little blog or nearly anything you can think of. You just have to figure out how to put the information into the database and pull it out so that it accomplishes what you need it to.
How friendly it is to the people using it is up to you in how you create the forms for input. It takes a bit of time making anything newbie / idiot proof. But it’s something you have to do. The client hires you because they don’t know what the heck their doing. It’s not hard to build a highly functional site for a cat from the stone age. Just takes some time to figure out how to the first time you try. After that, after all the firsts, it’s cake.
The more you work with it the more you know not to wear the yellow iron workers helmet with the pink stilettos and the flannel hot shorts and the lime green halter.
Hope this helps.
PS.. If you look at a Wordpress template and an EE template you’ll love the similarities. Instead of php tags you use curly brackets. With practice it takes an hour tops to convert a WP template over to EE.