I doubt they do mich different than you do with their OS.
People are more motivated by feelings than actual logic. The person you are responding to even states that Ubuntu "feels good to use". That is some car advertisement level of feeling based reasoning.
Another thing is that people really hate it when things change. Especially a UI change. Every change in the Windows UI has been met with disgust. And if there is one thing different between linux distros, it's where they place all the buttons, menus, etc. So people prefer to stay with the distro they know.
Allow me to translate:
Top left is a thermal cycler. Basically it heats and cools samples at a given rate. This is primarily used for magic. Top right is the fancier version of this, it is for qMagic, so it can do the heating and cooling and has a magic detector for magic components that reacts to magic happening so you can quantify approximately how much magic is going on in the beige box.
Bottom right is a luminex. This uses detection of magic signals to measure magic.
Bottom left is the beige box where magic happens.