we believe there is a strong possibility that many of the users who come to this site will have little to no experience with the Stack Exchange network and many of its intricacies. In addition, given the unique nature of this site's origin, it makes sense to artificially lower the reputation thresholds so users can easily access different privileges.
Those two sentences seem to me to be in opposition rather than one implies the other. If someone doesn't know how the network operates, why should they be granted privileges earlier?
I can stomache a lot of the suggestions and see why they could be attractive for public beta (and beta only- not after graduated from beta), but I think close-voting should be a higher privilege, and re-opening as well. Regular public beta is 500 rep. Take a happy medium. 1 rep to close vote and 15 to reopen vote are both way too low. If you keep that, you will have pointless wars about things that should stay closed, and probably a bunch of inappropriate close-votes.