I think the idea of Pop is that it's for people like scientists and engineers who need to use their machine as a tool for computation, but may have no knowledge or interest in system administration. Likely quite comfortable on the command line, but also likely couldn't tell you what systemd is or how to use iptables.

For many people in that audience "Linux Distro where the latest CUDA just works" is a huge selling point. That is unfortunately not guaranteed to be true of Ubuntu, necessarily, although things have gotten better.

I just switched to it recently and am very happy, it feels like it was perfectly designed for how I use the computer.