I don't think it's too hard to "get" Minecraft. The way it was originally explained to me (I purchased it in the beta) was "it's Lego." I played for a few weeks and it was good fun.

What pulled me back into Minecraft was logic circuits. I found Minecraft to be an incredible teaching tool to help impart the absolute basics of circuit design to others. From the first step of turning on a bulb (or, in Minecraft terms, opening a door) with a circuit, to building memory and discovering new ways of state persistence, all the way to building entire machines for the express purpose of computation, Minecraft manages to turn the learning process into enough of a game to leave people associating "logic" with "fun."

I think it's probably only half a decade before we start seeing people in universities who were inspired to be electrical engineers by Minecraft.