The real answer is that the GeoTools tutorial is pernicious. So if any future stragglers come here know this: on the NetBeans tutorial (and perhaps the Eclipse tutorial which I also failed to get to work) there are steps which define how to set up the pom.xml. Follow them. However, do NOT copy and paste their full pom.xml file, there's an error in it somewhere. I merely added the dependencies and repositories and built the project - successfully.
But wait there's more. After building the project I was unable to run the Quickstart.java example they provide. It crashed because
JMapFrame.showMap(map)
only accepts a "MapContext" type, which the documentation calls "deprecated". So, I imported
org.geotools.map.MapContext
and changed
MapContent map = new MapContent();
to
MapContext map = new MapContext();
Viola, beating the system. I wish developers would actually test their tutorials!