Most folks don’t want a challenge; they just want to put a cd in and presto, majico … new OS. A working OS. Glad you had the patients to make it work.
But that's me. I started with the Edgy release and had to reinstall the OS when Feisty came out because my laptop didn't handle the upgrade well. But, Feisty was a whole lot easier to get the wireless up and running and I didn't have to do any other configuration. It pretty much was good right "out of the box".
What I'm saying is Ubuntu is getting there. The first Windows release I was able to say worked perfect (as far as fewest crashes) was XP and it was a long way from the old Win 3.1.
As a side note, if this thing continues with Ubuntu and Linux in general, and considering the bust that Vista turned out to be, and given that Linux releases like Ubuntu are free, I wouldn't be at all surprise to start seeing MS start to lose significant market share in the next 5 to 10 years. I'm thinking they'll be down to like 90% share in 5 years and then like 65% - 75% in 10 years.
Who knows?