I found the Minikube getting started to be a good experience about a month ago. If you did make Minikube the default for "give it a try" that would instantly gain k8s more credibility in my eyes, as it calls attention to the excellent tooling around k8s, diminishes the perception of GKE as the only first-class k8s environment (ahem, lock-in!), and promotes the notion of an economical and fast k8s development environment.
It's a local setup to let you give Kubernetes a try. We haven't made it the default in the "give it a try" dialog yet, but we're considering it.
Disclosure: I'm an engineer at Google and I work on Minikube.