A distro working out-of-the-box for a certain user group is not a weird spinoff. Some people love to economize time; a distro that takes care of exactly that is a good deal.
There is a very good reason why the Arch forums do want reports from arch derivatives, because they are all inevitably broken by their tiny maintainer teams.
Well yes it is. Zorin is literally based on Ubuntu LTS and their packages are binary compatible.