I'm not sure if you meant "hide" it so that they'd never use it or hide it so they wouldn't see it before they were ready. I think the intention on Apple's part was the latter.
It isn't that hard to accidentally double-click the home button and get to the other running Apps. This is a natural effect that good UI depends on. Rather than filling the screen with a control for every possible option, you get this "hidden" functionality that users discover by mistake.
Once there, swiping left and right is an obvious thing to do, but even if you don't think about it, you again can do it by mistake.
I found the voice command functionality by mistake when I held the home button down while thinking about what I wanted to do next (And have occasionally accidentally invoked it in this way since.)
