It makes adding space easier down the road, either by linking disks or if you clone your root drive to a larger drive, which tends to not be something most "end users" (I try not to use that description but you said it heh) would do. Yes, using LVM is optional.

It's all skippable if you want... Just put a large / filesystem on a partition and be on your way. There are good reasons for using it in some cases (see my response now).