No one's underselling this, you're overselling this. Jockey (their proprietary software installer) didn't become a thing in Ubuntu until their 6.10-7.04 releases. 2-2.5 years after the first version.
SuSE, Mandrake and other distributions were shipping proprietary software in their base installs in 2003-ish; four years before Ubuntu did.
There's no doubt that Fedora and Debian's hard stance on Free Software turned people away. However, even if they did include them, Ubuntu would still be where it is today. Because their popularity mostly came from the millions of CDs they shipped to people for free.
Fedora (or Mandriva, Xandros, Linspire, etc) would be the most popular distro today, if Shuttleworth did the same for them (and just included jockey on the Fedora discs, with the RPMForge repos pre-installed). But then his ego wouldn't have been stroked and he couldn't be in charge, despite the outcome being far greater for the Linux community overall.
I was there. They shot to the most popular distros right away. Just go look at distrowatch for 2004-2006.
Regardless, let's pretend your point is accurate. The bigger point is they didn't do anything new or better than anyone. And, in fact, were a net negative for many communities/efforts.
It helps if you read the entire post, not your own little cherrypicked context.
SuSE, Mandrake and other distributions were shipping proprietary software in their base installs in 2003-ish; four years before Ubuntu did.
There's no doubt that Fedora and Debian's hard stance on Free Software turned people away. However, even if they did include them, Ubuntu would still be where it is today. Because their popularity mostly came from the millions of CDs they shipped to people for free.
Fedora (or Mandriva, Xandros, Linspire, etc) would be the most popular distro today, if Shuttleworth did the same for them (and just included jockey on the Fedora discs, with the RPMForge repos pre-installed). But then his ego wouldn't have been stroked and he couldn't be in charge, despite the outcome being far greater for the Linux community overall.