You are of course right that it is Linux, and Linux without a terminal is not Cricket, but the point I was raising is that Ubuntu still does a lot more
for you than other distro's. This is also the cause of a few geek wars on other forums (and now this one too, by the looks of it.

)
The last time I looked at Ubuntu (and installed it,) it was around version 4 or 5 iirc, I remember plopping the CD in the drive, clicking a button or two here and there and *ping* all done. Fantastically quick and easy.
Gentoo - that's much more involved. I had to manually format the disks, create my fstab, setup my make.conf with the correct (and customised in places) system information, create the kernel .config, compile the kernel, install and configure the bootloader ... yada yada..
The difference between the two, is for a power freak like me, I can monitor and change whatever I want for Gentoo. Ubuntu decides for me. There is also a few things that came with Ubuntu that I didn't like (Gnome for one :p) Sure I can change it
after it's all installed, but I don't want that. I prefer for it not to go in/on in the first place. Gentoo has also helped me immensly in learning about operating systems in general.