I recall reading somewhere that some of the better font hinting algorithms are patented such that its tough for linux distros to make them as pretty. My pie-in-the-sky hope is that the knight in shining Google armor comes in and buys some of these patents for their ChromeOS and opens them up in the process.

But really, Linux is far from ugly and can look as nice as anything you can do on windows/mac. Your fonts will be the same and you are by no means limited to Gnome or any of its themes. Having bad defaults is one thing, being ugly is another.

Reddit's search is broken now but users their post some absolutely gorgeous desktops where they do all kinds of neat stuff with conky. I will try to post some if the search comes back within the edit timeframe.