If you're a Mac user, they're actually - in all likelihood - not that obscure; you can use the same exact key combinations in pretty much every OS X application.
The built-in tutorial is indeed exceissively comprehensive, but those "obscure" keybindings are incredibly useful, particularly C-a and C-e (much faster than using "Home" or "End", respectively), which is why they're covered. And really, the Emacs bindings aren't any harder than the CUA bindings; they're just different, and can be easily gleaned (in graphical Emacs installations, at least) by poking around in the menu and looking at the shortcuts for certain commands, like opening/saving files or killing/yanking.
> and even the standard copy/paste/kill key combinations don't work.
This is easily fixable by going to Options -> Use CUA Keys, which enables C-x for kill, C-v for yank, and C-c for copy. OS X users can also just use Command-C/V/X like normal, with or without this option enabled.