Thank you to Dave, Courtney and Michael for your contributions to this thread.
I like Courtney's suggestion especially, about the fact that people accustomed with wikitext do not have to break their train of thoughts when adding links.
I remain a bit unsatisfied in terms of potential motivations for non-technical people to appreciate wikitext. I suspect that no matter what I tell them they'll remain unenthusiastic if not outright annoyed. Hopefully they'll help each other to go beyond that first uncomfortable step of learning something that from their point of view is code (no, it won't matter to them that actual code is far more complicated).
Again, thank you for your contribution guys, much appreciated!
Ciao!
Manu