I think encryption is much more readily understood by nontechnical people than hashing, though.

While I agree with you 100% for the general public I think if someone is manually decrypting a file (assumedly with gpg) they understand enough to get hashing. Now if you want to get into the realm of really "understood" by the public you should just send a Word doc or zip file with a password on it.

Yes, the latter is the kind of thing, no need for gpg complexity. The original comment talked about an encrypted flash drives, and that's usually done in a fairly accessible way.