Yup, that's what I was really meaning to ask and what I was hoping to hear about.
Perhaps the question you meant to ask was whether we were surprised when WYSIWYG took over word-processing for the masses. No, we weren't, but we weren't attracted to it either, because it sacrificed markup's potential for expressing the logical structure of documents and thus fostering portability of text among distinct physical forms, e.g. man pages on terminals and in book form or technical papers as TMs and as journal articles. WYSIWYG was also unsuitable for typesetting math. (Microsoft Word clumsily diverts to a separate markup pane for math.)
Interesting, I was wishing for something along those lines after using TeX Studio for a while. A quick preview side by side is nice, but wouldn't it be great to be able to work on the preview side of the pane while the markup side changes (as minimally as possible) showing your changes as you make them and being able to switch back and forth? Personally, I prefer troff to tex, but just idea of markup and WYSIWYG is enticing.Moreover, WYSIWYG was out of sympathy with Unix philosophy, as it kept documents in a form difficult for other tools to process for unanticipated purposes, In this regard, I still regret that Luca Cardelli and Mark Manasse moved on from Bell Labs before they finished their dream of Blue, a WYSIWYG editor for markup documents, I don't know yet whether that blue-sky goal is achievable. (.docx may be seen as a ponderous latter-day attempt. Does anyone know whether it has fostered tool use?)