>... these impressions come from someone who’s used mostly Windows at work and Mac at home. Sure, there’s a sprinkling of Solaris, IRIX, and Linux mixed in there, but I’ve never used Ubuntu, haven’t used any distribution of Linux in quite some time ...
The author seems to be using it to prototype a research project as quickly as possible.
Give him a year and he'll be running a dev box with minimal Arch + Xmonad base and multiple Ubuntu Servers in KVM.