One of the reasons the Ubuntu project is doing so well is that it puts a cleaner, slightly more polished face on what starts out as Debian.

The new user doesn't know that Ubuntu pulls a lot of packages from Debian Unstable. Instead, they think of the Canonical-run distribution as "a Linux for the rest of us." Sure, marketing is involved, but at the core, Ubuntu is a fairly solid system -- mostly because it's based on Debian.