Some things are not the same as other things. Anybody remember having to carry a 5.25" hard drive around in case someone at a meeting handed you a floppy with their PowerPoint slides on? Oh, and when you swapped your CRT TV for LCD, did you need to get a new antenna fitted? If you did have to do any of those things, wasn't it made worthwhile by the fact that your new toy was 10x faster and/or 1/10 the size of the one it replaced, and often cost the same, if not cheaper?
These macs are a only few percent faster than the ones they replace, and are more expensive. Apple could have retained at least one USB-A port along with the new ports but they chose to make the box a few mm thinner instead. At least they could have ensured that there was a nice, matching, guaranteed compatible multi port adapter in the store on day one for a sensible price.
I've done a serious tot-up of what I'd need in terms of adapters, docks and cables and it comes to £400-£500. That's not the sort of money that most people can ignore.
There's also the industry-wide problem that intel have knobbled TB3 and any USBC port driven by intel controllers by not supporting DisplayPort 1.3, which could be very important in the future for support of multiple 4K/5k displays.
