Once again he did not say board game, he said family game. A family game should be something I open and start playing within 10-15 minutes of opening the box. It requires absolutely NO system mastery, and should require the bare minimum of effort to start playing.
World of Warcraft has a board game with bunches of fiddly bits. The first time I played it was a disaster. It had nothing to do with the fiddly bits, it had to do with the extensive rules book. That is not a family game.
If a family game can't be played with minimum effort within 30 minutes it's a failure in my book.
Imagine if you will the following.
D&D The Boxed Set.
Includes: Dice, 2 page Quick Start Rules, 6 Pregenerated Characters, battlemat, tokens or miniatures, (2) Easy to Follow 16 page Adventures, Players Guide, Campaign/DM Guide, character sheets.
When you open the box you go grab a pregenerated character, read over the quick start rules and follow one of the adventure. You are up and running in the time that it takes to open the box, select a character, and read the Q/S rules.
When you finish the adventure, you can play the second adventure or you can go look at the Player's and DM Guide for the expansion rules of the game (Character Creation, Creating Adventures, Monsters, etc.). When you finish reading those books you should have had time to run both adventures and have enough materials to adventure for a few levels. Make additional adventures available for sale or through DDI, maybe even a solo adventure.
You market the "crap" out of this boxed set, and that is how you "hook" a new generation of players to the game.
The highest hurdle in introducing anyone to this game has always been "what do I need to get started?" With this format you can have people start to play right out of the gate, without having to spend 30 minutes or more searching for how to build a character.
Get them started immediately, then expand from there. There is no reason you can't have a PHB, DMG, and MM for sale, but for the love of the game, get people playing first and foremost. If you do a good job with the initial "hook", and people like your game, the sales for the other supplements (PHB, DMG, MM) are easier.
As long as you make the game cryptically difficult to start playing you will have issues in getting people playing. None of what is included on that boxed set makes it a board game. D&D has always been a game of the imagination, capitalize on that.