I had to go ahead and add ubuntu restricted extras from the software center, but after that everything worked. I didn't have to add any drivers for this distro to get sound, vid, mic, etc working properly. That's not surprising because the last few Ubuntu releases have gotten a lot better at out of the box hardware support. That's probably from Debian, but I don't actually know.

I believe oakaz was referring to the ability to actually play movie and audio files which use non-free formats, such as MP3. This is a frequent/historical pain point for laypersons using Linux desktops.

The answer is yes. In the installer, there is a checkbox that asks if the user wants to install these non-free codecs.