No. The main motivation behind Ubuntu (and its predecessors Knoppix, Mepis, UserLinux) was realizing that a knowledgeable person could get a nice, easy to use Debian desktop in a couple of hours and then let it in the hands of less knowledgeable persons. It was hard to install.

On the other hand, you could boot a perfectly workable system from a live CD (Knoppix) but it was hard to install.

So the motivation was: could we get the best of both worlds? Easy to launch/install and easy to use maintain once installed? This was also more or less coordinated with a huge shift in GNOME development where UX became the main goal and development switched to a 6 months based schedule.

Detecting hardware was part of what was hard with Debian but was not seen the most important part. Having a nice coherent desktop at first boot was the goal.

source : I was part of it.