I don't think it's very intuitive at all. To clarify, I think it's just a learning curve hurdle and not something that's fundamentally wrong with the game.
For example—and feel free to correct me if I'm totally off base here, you've all undoubtedly put far more time into this series than I have—the inputs and their corresponding moves don't seem to correlate very much character-to-character; there's not an overarching set of "rules" that someone can grasp and use to assist in figuring out how to play one character after gaining a familiarity with another—beyond memorizing the movelist, of course.
Contrast with Soul Calibur, where inputs and strings don't vary wildly, and similar inputs net similar attacks from most of the cast. Not everything correlates, of course, but it does present a general, intuitive set of "rules" that at least gives you the opportunity to try things without returning to the movelist (essentially, mashing without mashing). And the result is that it takes you less time to get to the advanced stuff because you've begun already familiar with the fundamentals.
(Granted, Soul Calibur is much more committed to what any given button does, where left-punch/right-punch doesn't necessarily mean much of anything.)
. . . And I think that lends to explain in part why those huge Tekken juggles are so outrageously daunting. And the complication of the matter is compounded when you're swapping between two characters rather than one. And so on.
