Remembering Linux is Linux is Linux...
The biggest issue will be what happens when our newbie plugs his/her digital camera in, will it work? is it hard to use. Trust me .. command line will really cause an issue here. Then it will be adding some new software.
The best answer to this seems to be Project Utopia. Ximian have hired kernel hacker Robert Love and set him loose on the desktop, with the goal of driving kernel development for what matters to desktop users. "Project Utopia's aim is to create a seamless integration of hardware devices with the GNOME desktop. It is an umbrella project which includes a number of smaller projects, including the Linux 2.6 kernel, udev (user-space device naming), the freedesktop.org HAL (hardware abstration layer) project, GNOME libraries, end-user applications, and more." (Check Google for links; Love's ximian page is missing in action.) Greig was asking the other day why I prefer GNOME to KDE. Part of it is cool things like this. I feel this is the sort of innovation Linux needs.
But its hard to come up with really objective test methodologies as I would have to know what an average user is ... and here we go again ....
The question comes down to "what distributions do the people who write cool things package them for", and the answer, especially for GNOME things, will be SUSE and Fedora. Then the next question is "which other distributions are releasing quickly and incorporating these cool new things." (Yes Malcolm, we know you can probably emerge it already. Try it and tell us what happens!) As "Most People", I agree with what you say (with some standard reservations; I respect that they can't have MP3 out of the box, but would like to see that tidied up, or at least a post-install "Click me to get all the other stuff"), and feel that one thing we didn't do nearly clearly enough at the last installfest, mostly due to lack of time, was "where do we go from here." At the next installfest I hope we forgo CD installs for a more "WLUG will preinstall it for you from the network, and spend the day with you going over how to keep it up to date and get new software." Perhaps we might even run it as a presentation while the machines are installing. Craig