The best development OS is the production OS, so just use whatever you're going to deploy on. Ubuntu (Server) and RHEL and Centos are ubiquitous. I think the easiest to manage in prod is Ubuntu.
Of course, I still have Windows as my primary OS, if for no other reason than I'm too lazy to deal with the inevitable driver wrangling. (Caveat: PuTTY into an Arch VM is my dev environment.)
However, my laptop has an Intel video card. I'm sure with an AMD or nVidia video card, using Linux can be more problematic.
As is SUSE Linux Enterprise and openSUSE. People often forget about us.
To start, I'm not a sales person. I'm a developer. If you want a proper sales pitch, you can request one from www.suse.com. Also, if Ubuntu works better for you then that's what works for you -- I work with people from Canonical and RedHat on a daily basis, and I know they make good stuff just like us.
Longer history in enterprise deployments. PTFs and patches for packages are supported in zypper (not true for dpkg). Kernel live patches (no reboot kernel fixes) are supplied as packages. Very good integration with a wide variety of tools such as the Open Build Service (making your own appliances and packages), YaST (our manager for the system which is integrated into everything), snapper (snapshot before and after updates/upgrades/changes), SUSE Manager (allows management of many machines and configuration), and a bunch of other cool stuff.
Also (and this is honestly my fault for being bad at using computers), I've personally never had an Ubuntu install that has worked for more than 4 months.