As I've understood it, there's a couple of cases when you may want to use FitNesse.
My personal opinion and experience is:
Can someone share some other opinions on the subject? How have FitNesse been valuable to you?
So yes, you could write acceptance tests in nUnit, but that misses the point. Fitnesse is supposed to be an alternative UI to your application that expresses a detailed flow of assertions:
The user does this The user does that the user now sees this
Ideally the fitness layer is capable of sitting directly over the very top level of your application replacing the final rendering layer.
Unit testing tools are not really designed for that, can you do it? Sure. But it's weird.
Another thing, in my opinion, is that you're a bit off in the idea that "You want non-technical people to write the tests". Fitnesse is a tool for collaboration. You should be writing the tests WITH the stakeholders, giving and getting feedback. Then, it has the benefit of being the documentation. So a year later, when someone wants to know why the system works the way it does, you can pull up the tests, displayed in a way a BA can understand (unlike nUnit) and say well, here it is, should we change it?
FitNesse is designed for a wholly different purpose than NUnit. Doing acceptance testing with NUnit means, first of all, that the entire test suite has to be written in code. FitNesse is designed with the intent that you can, given a certain level of preparation, write your tests in data. These are very different modes of operation, and they apply to very different resources. They also encourage very different views of the world - a FitNesse test case designer is working on the assumption that a very simple, straightforward transformation is going to happen, whereas an NUnit user has a great deal of knowledge about how that transformation works and has hooks into the system which have nothing to do with the transformation itself.
If you can't get stakeholders to write use cases and functional tests, then you need a stand-in for those stakeholders, which is where a traditional QA department comes in. Not having a stakeholder to do this stuff isn't an excuse for not doing it.
The benefit of using FitNesse to read your data over a custom format is pretty simple: It's a standard way to enter test cases. If you don't see the benefit in that, perhaps you need to spend some time going down the path you describe, because eventually you're going to hit some walls and maybe they'll help you understand.
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