I just switched to Fedora 19 on the desktop and it's far better. It's lightning fast and everything just works out of the box; wifi, hibernate, SMB/CIFS networking, RDP. Miracle. Was zero config for me and it's polished.
It's got to the point, that I'll probably switch all my stuff to CentOS 7 when it comes out (this will be based on RHEL7 which is based on Fedora 19).
I just need stuff that works these days.
1) The cost of work-arounds is incredibly cheaper than surveying the distro space to find one that works for you.
2) It is likely the case that the benefits of using Ubuntu outweigh the cost of the work-arounds (at least this is true for me and probably many others).
1) doesn't scale well. The amount of work just to get Ubuntu into a usable shape is increasing per release. I can't tell you the number of hours I've pissed out of the window on it over the last few years. It's the equivalent hack status of Windows now which removes every competitive advantage I have by using it to start with.
2) There are no explicit benefits to using Ubuntu other than you probably already have it. The benefits are disppearing faster as to be honest it's not really a fairly compatible Linux distribution. There are Ubuntu-isms creeping into other things and this is seriously bad news. Canonical just want their slice like the Unix vendors in the 1990's.