I feel like the OP misconstrued things like "doesn't work out of the box". What he meant was, "I needed to install the package to get my video driver and sound driver working".

Generally Arch doesn't install something until you ask it to.

Alternatively, you could say this like every other linux distro at some level.

I started back at about Redhat 5.0, used a lot of distros over the years, currently I use ubuntu because it 'mostly worked' from install, although it didn't really. I've ended up doing make/make install a few times for packages I needed configured like I wanted them. I might go back to Slackware when I get around to it, not really a big fan of Ubuntu at this point for what I do (programming).

Isnt gentoo still like that? I have been using gentoo since I got into using and learning about linux (cant really remember how long now). And it seems pretty much the same.