I also do not mean to come across that the pilots on flight 447 were in anyway incompetent.
Seems you don't have to. But, it's so, so easy to fly those last few minutes from the comfort of one's armchair. It must have been enough to throw a good mind into chaos for a moment or two, but for those with very limited time handling real hardware in extreme conditions, it seems what they had in front of them was more than they could unravel. It takes a lot of willpower to shut out a vista of sophisticated equipment and concentrate on one small and comparatively primitive device.
BBC News - Air France Rio crash: Pilots 'lacked training'