Maggie's Farm

Bits aren't very weird. Even before digital computers became so economical and ubiquitous, many modern people were already familiar with things that systematically break down arbitrarily complex information into yes and no, like the game of twenty questions, or similar dichotomies in the operation of an abacus or in telegraphic Morse code. Then with some engineering cleverness so that the value of one bit automatically triggers some kind of change in connected bits, and some systematic thought, it's not hard --- easily accessible to a bright high schooler --- to get to things like a circuit for automatically adding two numbers together, and not that hard --- accessible to at least a fair number of high schoolers --- to implement a computer that's (a finite but huge version of) Turing's (elegantly but impractically infinite) abstraction of a universal computing machine, and after that it can all be software.

Qubits are weirder than that, with correlation issues that have no analogues in day to day life, so instead of the first step up the abstraction ladder being something accessible like an abacus toy you can hang in a crib to interest an infant, even the first step is a doozy. And then for good measure, because life isn't fair, the later steps tend to be harder too.

"substitute for the connecting 'wire' between the signal and the receiver?"

Entanglement tends to defy simple useful explanation, AFAIK. It is generally not much of a substitute for a wire between the signal and the receiver; though. In fact, one peculiar thing about it is that it resists being exploited to transmit information. It's a pervasive correlation with a number of peculiar regularities to it. One such regularity is that it seems to be impossible to take advantage of the correlation to transmit information faster than the speed of light. That might not sound so peculiar, but it is, because the correlation, viewed from any "there must be deterministic behavior behind the scenes" intuition, would require the crew of backstage deterministic elves running the show to be signalling to each other faster than the speed of light in order to manage the performance that we see. If you like, you can look up "Einstein Podolsky Rosen" for the stock famous example of a setup that makes this particular peculiarity central to the outcome.

So much for what it's not; what is it? Um. Entanglement is more nearly the kind of in-phase vs. out-of-phase issue that we associate with mundane waves. It can show up in behavior which is closely analogous to the interference patterns we sometimes see in light waves in special situations, like laser speckle in the light from a laser pointer or bar code scanner, or like the shifting color patterns in reflections from a compact disc. But entanglement occurs in arbitrarily many dimensions, rather than the single dimension (usually time, or a single spatial axis) that shows up in the kind of mundane waves that are easily acessible to play with. And if you are very very clever, like Peter Shor (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shor%27s_algorithm), you can figure out a devious way to line everything up so that --- in principle, though not currently in practice --- certain useful information could be coaxed out of the high-dimensional interference behavior. It's all wrapped up in several layers of other math and classical computing, but the quantum part seems to be fundamentally a trick with quantum interference, and not AFAICS much like a trick with signals sneaking around without wires.

That said, there are some communications tricks using quantum entanglement that are somewhat reminiscent of what you said entanglement might be like --- in particular, communications setups that resist eavesdropping. Those don't feel exactly like the backstage deterministic elves sneakily conspiring using wires that we can't possibly detect and using messages on those supersecret wires to determine the outcomes we see, but they do feel more like that than they feel like interference patterns in thousands of dimensions.