That's what I loved about that game. You want to be a bunch of college kids in a band? Can do. A cadre of cybered up special forces operators in a guerilla warfare scenario? No problem, you can do that right out of the gate.
I wouldn't necessarily call it newbie friendly though, looking back it was kinda crunchy and you at least need your GM to be pretty familiar with the game if you have new players. New player + new GM is probably going to end up with a lot of dead PCs/sudden GM fudging. Though I suppose a novice GM can do that to anything. I always found I had to do a lot of coaching to new players that had only played DnD or similar to stop them getting into a lot of trouble very quickly.