I am curious what the typical time is to pick up on these 3 basic chords that you have in the first steps lesson #8, am an absolute newbie ... excited to play but dont want to get frustrated, give up

I learned these chords when I was 11 - they seemed to be the hardest things ever at that time ... and they are not easy to pickup as a beginner, but it is all down to practice. It probably took me weeks if not months to get on top of them. Keep working at them and don't worry if it takes a while to get ahead of them. A lot of guitarists never learn full chords, they just learn a few power chords, but that is limiting, so I encourage you to learn as many chords as possible!

yeah, as Andrew said, it takes some time to feel comfortable with the chords. I was so anxious to playing songs when I was a beginner so I used to play reductions of the chords to at least sounds close to the songs that I wanted to play. Practice every day the different positions and be patient, you should have maybe in less of a month if you practice every day.