Wow, >>5, I had the same problem, and found the same solution. Coincidence?

>>4, regarding a huge free software database, I don't see how that's unique to Ubuntu. FreeBSD (which PC-BSD is based on) has two, one for pre-built binaries ("packages") and one for source code for building your own ("ports") and both are pretty easy to use; installing a package takes just one shell command.
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/ports.html

And Mac OS X has Fink for binaries and DarwinPorts for source code. Both are fairly simple CLI apps, and there are GUI apps for Fink as well.
http://fink.sourceforge.net/
http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/

So a great software database is a nice feature, but it's hardly unique to any one given system.

I will concede that getting a wireless card and USB media to work out-of-the-box is nice, though. I have to set up both by hand. It turns out the wireless card I got is unsupported by any OSS drivers, but fortunately there's a FreeBSD program which can put a wrapper around Windows drivers and make them usable by FreeBSD… So maybe FreeBSD is even letting me use this card where Linux wouldn't, after all. And mounting USB media requires tail-ing a log file to see what dev it's noticing the device on, then mount_msdosfs-ing it; not too difficult once you figure out what you need to do, but still far from user friendly.

I'd like to hear more from Ubuntu users. For one, I dare someone to justify the whole MP3 fiasco -- hardly seems like "sane defaults" to me. =P