I said "shouldn't be much different" not because I haven't ever maintained a hackintosh, but I haven't done it in a while. It was kinda a pain back when I did it years ago on a 2005 Dell Inspiron, so I just bought a MacBook Pro once I had the money in 2008 after I started doing freelance while in school. But I still did it. My custom built PCs were mostly for gaming, and the parts I had in them (since I didn't build them for a hackintosh) didn't have compatible kexts for several of the more critical components.
However, from what I've been reading over the last year or two, it's fairly affordable and easy to put together a small box with parts from NewEgg or wherever people buy their parts nowadays (I've been out of the game for a whileNewEgg was a savior after dealing with TigerDirect mail catalogs for years). At least it seems a lot easier than it was back in the early days of hackintosh. 9to5Mac and Lifehacker have put together and pointed to some good guides. It's definitely true that if you dive into the world of hackintosh, you can pretty much plan on staying put for a while on each version. That's not really a huge con for me though as new releases of OS X lately have been pretty buggy on the well spec'd Apple machines that I use, which is pretty ridiculous since Apple makes the software for a limited number of machines that they design themselves.
I said "somewhat knowledgeable" because my grandpa, who is only somewhat knowledgeable about computers, was able to build his own PC and was always having to deal with broken drivers and stuff like that, but he just considered that part of the ownership and maintenance of a PC. Then after years of PC use he switched to Macs and learned them. So people who are just somewhat computer saavy can do it if they take the time to do some tutorials. In 6th grade I was so bad with computers that I wasn't even sure how to do basic stuff like save files in Word, but by 7th grade I was using Photoshop and Illustrator, by 8th grade I was making websites, by 9th grade I was programming my own word processor, and by 10th grade I was building my own computers. Just taught myself as I went. People can learn, they just don't trust themselves enough to do it. I was growing up as the web was exploding and that was a huge resource that helped get me started. I'm not saying it would be easy, but I'm saying that most anyone who is halfway decent with a computer can teach themselves. With all the resources available today it would seem that it's easier than ever.