You say that kids who know how to jailbreak their tablet and run a GBA emulator understand computers?
It's usually just people downloading mystery software (could be malware but oh well) onto their computer which promises to have a button that says "jailbreak" and then they jailbreak their device with it not knowing what goes on and then use a magical 'jailbreak app' (cydia, etc) on their device which in turn gives them magical 'free' software and GBA emulators.
So they can Google for what they want and follow simple instructions to get the computer to do what they want? Great, that's probably enough not to have to ask somebody for help with almost any computer problem/thing you want the computer to do. Using computers will always be an exercise in sensible and appropriate abstraction, in this case I doubt they need to know how jailbreaking actually works.
Except that's more like a Harry-Potter way of doing things, where if someone tells you the right incantation you can perform the magic, but there's no way you're going to fix things if it doesn't work and no chance of understanding what's going on in order to do anything new.
Yet his description is precisely how I became someone with over 10 years professional IT experience and 6 years over that as a developer.
My 386 era machine at the time was without internet. My first experience was through AOL and Netcom in the early 90's. I mostly got lucky when things broke as I would fix one thing and break another horribly.
Slowly over time I began offloading large chunks of brain power to the internet as Google and others started really upping their game. Now, as a developer I don't keep syntax idiosyncrasies between languages in my head, I search. I don't keep esoteric error messages from Microsoft Office in my head, again I search. The proper use of Google has practically paid my salary for the last 16+ years. Once Stack Overflow came on the scene, my developer skillset took a quantum leap and I suspect a lot of people could agree with that statement. Now, I can say with certainty a significant portion of my computer literacy comes from my ability to use Google effectively.
I'm completely convinced that teaching proper search techniques to just an intermediate level would bring a lot of people close to being at least "literate enough." I expect everyone to be able to solve any user software problem they have but that should extend to the OS as well. Hardware problems aren't that much harder to solve but they generally require more practical knowledge, like how a specific peripheral behaves under normal working conditions. That can easily be taught as well but I expect only people that care to not pay ridiculously high prices for repair would care to venture into this territory.
Regardless, this is a long way of saying this isn't a Harry-Potter way of doing things for most people. It might seem like magic at first to a vast majority even, but over time that will turn into confidence and skill to solve genres of problems, not just specifics.
It's usually just people downloading mystery software (could be malware but oh well) onto their computer which promises to have a button that says "jailbreak" and then they jailbreak their device with it not knowing what goes on and then use a magical 'jailbreak app' (cydia, etc) on their device which in turn gives them magical 'free' software and GBA emulators.