Big cities have things like major hospitals and major employers, they have airports, they have baseball stadiums. They've also got social networks -- it's much easier to make friends in a place with 100,000 people your age than 50.
Now, escaping to the undeveloped areas is cheap, and many of them have access to things like beautiful mountains or beaches that are either far away from or too crowded near big cities. However, rural areas generally have poor infrastructure that big cities have, and often have extremely bad schools.
Being 1-2 hours away from a big city? That's kind of a sweet spot. You're still close enough to the city for culture and hospitals and the airport. But you're on a big plot of land, and since you're still in a metro, you've probably got reasonably good infrastructure and schools.
The whole "move to the mountains" thing that so many people talk about assumes you don't care about good schools, airports, hospitals, etc.