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Prof. Guy Blelloch of Carnegie Mellon University believes that parallel programming is easy:

I believe that at the right level of abstraction, it is not and in fact
can be as easy as sequential programming. Note, however, that "at the
right level of abstraction" should be considered with care.
Pragmatically there are some problems today with taking advantage of
the "easiness" of parallel programming.

http://www.cilk.com/multicore-blog/bid/9108/Is-Parallel-Programming-Hard

I largely agree with both his list of core problems and how these are all issues of abstraction. In particular, I believe that people have become spoiled and spend less time considering boundary conditions than they had to when the compute power available was orders of magnitude less.