I appreciate the tutorial, and you've presented it wonderfully, you really have. I'd like to give feedback on how you've really left a lot to be assumed by the person using it. This is rampant across the drupal community (and why more people aren't converting to it). It would be better to assume the audience know nothing, not that they are developers. Patronising some people is better than confusing most people.

I'm referring to the second step 1.
"I recommend plugging in snippets of code from this file to your theme's new page.tpl.php file. Where there's static content, replace it with php tags from the system's default page.tpl.php template."

That's the part most people are struggling with when making their own theme. They have no idea about this... and no one is explaining it to them.