What Ubuntu got popular off of was it's ease of setup. They now seem to be using that validation to justify their decisions in UI and everything else, which has nothing to do with what people liked about Ubuntu in the first place. I feel like their PR takes a "we know better than you" attitude for their decisions, but they never proved themselves to be competent at any of the things they're pushing for.
I get the impression that now most desktop distros have quite simple installers. Were they difficult before because of some technical obstacle, or simply because they hadn't spent the time to make it easy? (honest question - I didn't use Linux until Ubuntu). If it's the latter, that seems to give Canonical at least one point for knowing what users would want.
It wasn't the simplicity of the installer interface. It was the actual installation. Ubuntu did the best job simply working with a large variety of hardware. You installed it and you didn't have to do a bunch of painful manual setup by modifying a dozen obscure config files. Linux had the reputation of being a pain to setup, and ubuntu addressed that.
