I wouldn't say it pales. OK, this is kind of like comparing apples and oranges, but still:

Leopard:

    port list | wc -l
    5038

Tiger:

    fink list | wc -l
    8111

Ubuntu 8.04:

    apt-cache pkgnames | wc -l
    33720

So the number of packages is 5-6x smaller, but most common/useful packages are present. Also you should take into account that many packages present in ubuntu don't mean anything in OS X. And for example there are for example tons of python packages in Ubuntu, all/most of which can be easily installed through easy_install :-)

Let's compare how up to date the packages are:

    port info cmake
    cmake 2.6.1, devel/cmake (Variants: universal)
    ...

    apt-cache show cmake
    ...
    Version: 2.4.7-1build1
    ...

So based on sample of 1 package we can see that MacPorts is more up to date than Ubuntu. Joking aside, cmake really matters to me...