Section 2 of the charter mentions a 'standard library', which will include sockets and networking code. It is a lot easier, as a community, to ship a library than it is implementation-specific code. You, as a user, would use the 'standard library' and not care.
Okay, this is sounds good. Essentially my point would come down to "it should be easy to do networking in CLtL3" and if the path of least resistance is to standardise FFI and streams then that definitely makes sense.
I definitely appreciate your point about it not necessarily being about making CL easier for newcomers, as clearly a lot of the complex and initially confusing stuff is what, in the end, makes it a good language. As long as the end user experience of writing network code is (approximately) as simple as in newer scripting languages, I agree that whether you're using a standard library or standardised language features makes no odds, and so the approach of keeping it simple in order to make for an easy (ish!) standardisation process is the right choice.
Malcolm