I'd hazard a guess that there's a not-insignificant number of Ubuntu users for whom opening the terminal is "a bunch of footwork".

I used to live with a 40-something woman who was fairly technologically impaired, the kind of person you would expect to get a MacBook Air and call it a day. She ran Mint. Now, granted, it was installed by our room mate who was (still is, I suppose) a CS grad student, but she got by just fine with Mint, LibreOffice, and Chrome. Never used anything else, and never had a need to go plunking around on the command line.

I suspect Susan is not alone among Linux users who just wanted a cheap computer that worked and had some nerd install a user-friendly distro for them.