"Ubuntu [...] encourages the occasional foray into the terminal emulator" It's sadly not what Ubuntu is about. And they discourage compiling your own stuff IIRC.
I agree with some people here who say Lunix is not Lunix. Of course it's what you make out of it. Out of Ubuntu you can only try to make a worse Windows, but I also set up a tinycorelinux for my mum once: It took half an hour to make a laptop with broken disk controller boot into opera and configure opera to use a pdf reader. Oh shit, I still have to get printing to work... Of course I had to laugh pretty hard when google announced they will put a lot of work in a "chrome book".