Agreed 100%. I recently picked up a little thinkpad laptop as a take-everywhere-don't-mind-too-much-if-it-dies machine. Ubuntu 12.04 supported absolutely every bit of hardware on it out of the box, with the exception of the fingerprint reader, which needed a single package install, and nary a cfg file edit in sight (fingerprint auth for login and sudo is awesome!). This includes:

* Hardware accelerated graphics

* Suspend and resume when closing/opening lid

* All the non-standard thinkpad buttons - external monitor, volume etc

* USB bluetooth adaptor

* External bluetooth trackpad (Apple)

* 3G dongle - this was not only autodetected, but popped up a wizard that asked me to identify my carrier, and then proceeded to configure everything and just magically brought up the internets

Anyone who doesn't think this is a big deal has not been running linux for very long :-P

Personally, I still replace Unity with Gnome3, but that's a single add-repo and package install, taking about 2 minutes. Unity is significantly better with each release, if that continues I'll probably go back to it in a few versions.

I don't get the vitriol either. Slackware and Debian are still around if Ubuntu is too n00bish for you; personally I'm old and I want shit to just work. Haters gonna hate I suppose.