Yes, yes it is.
If you're using Ratpoison, well yeah, it's gonna be fugly. Gnome 3 and Unity look pretty sharp though, and Compiz and Clutter are at least as good as Quartz.
In fact, if you think nothing short of an OS X clone is pretty: How to Make Ubuntu Linux Look Like Mac OS X http://www.howtogeek.com/45817/
"Linux is ugly" is an outdated cliche. It used to be true. It's not anymore.
But you're right that Linux stopped being ugly. Even in Tiling WMs, we're pretty beautiful now. My windows now have the same gaussian blur and shadow abilities as on Mac OS X, thanks to Compton. My status bar has beautiful text set by Pango and rendered by Cairo. My text rendering is as good (or better than, against transparency) in OSX, thanks to the Infinality patchsets.
Really, it's only ugly if you do it wrong. One way of getting it wrong is to try and imitate OS X.
Same goes for Windows.
You can make Linux look like anything you want. If what you want is a clone of your old OS, well, I can't help your aesthetic taste, but I can at least make you happy.