I think you are over simplyfying things a bit here. A stark difference between Portal and Photoshop is that the Portal designers get to manufacture the players goal. Let that sink in for a moment. It's a huge difference.

Due to this difference, of course Portal's designers can use great game design to teach the user incrementally in a way that's on the path to the goal for each level, never too hard, never too boring, rewards all the users "I rock" pleasure sensors, and importantly, is never "off task".

The designers of photoshop and other business applications don't have that luxury. A photoshop user launches the app with some goal in mind (design a button for my iOS app, remove Granny's pimple from the family photo, crop out my ex, put a Kardashian head on The Incredible Hulk...) that the designers cannot possibly fathom. And it's any one of the 10,000,000+ things you can do with photoshop (so asking the user is not really going to work).

Users get annoyed with even the most well done hand holding when it's leading them down a path they have no interest in going down at the moment. So even the best tutorials and learning experiences in applications can be annoying since they don't help you do what you want to do right now.

The only path forward it seems is towards, simpler, single purpose applications that do a much wore limited