Is it valid to lump together all system with a linux kernel and then talk about the user experience? The user experience differ quite a lot depending on if you use debian, redhat, ubuntu, android, Mandrake, and so on. Sure, they can all be modified to be more or less the same experience, but the amount of modification needed to make a redhat user experience the same as a debian user experience is so large that you may just easier start with compiling your own kernel and go from there.

It is 2012, it is time to stop comparing BSD with Linux and start comparing FreeBSD with Debian, or OpenBSD with redhat, and so on.