I know several people who are your average users (use their PCs as a VCR and Facebook machine) who were convinced to switch to Ubuntu a few years ago and have since been enjoying it much more and have found it more intuitive than Windows.
Ubuntu has everything set up out of the box for you, and the feature that everyone seems to like the most is indeed, a Unix advantage: centralized package management.
In Windows, they had to hunt down binary installers from all over the web to get some piece of software. Now they just head over to the APT/dpkg frontend (Ubuntu Software Center) and do everything in a flash.
How is listening to music and browsing the web harder? You have a graphical DE that makes it point-and-click just like any other OS intended for consumer/mass use.
Perhaps you were installing a minimal Ubuntu without X11?