Most basic hosting services to this day still have a one click Wordpress, Drupal and various other CMS installs. GoDaddy advertises they have a one-click Wordpress install.

You are correct that if you plan on using your local machine for development then yes, you would have to know PHP and MySQL. Then you would need to know a bunch of other stuff in order to do that which opens another can of worms.

In my experience, this is what also makes Wordpress attractive - the low overhead to get up and running. Most people/businesses I know who used WP, just got a hosting account, transferred their domain and did all their development right on the production version of their site.