Ubuntu is not more polished than even Windows XP. The main things keeping me from switching my day-to-day work to my Ubuntu partition are (1) text rendering, (2) reliability, (3) battery life, and (4) Lenovo's Thinkvantage tools. Windows XP absolutely kills Ubuntu in these aspects.
1) That has changed recently with the addition of the Liberation fonts, but I agree - a few months back it was a hack
2) What? I don't think many people will agree with you on that aspect. The fact that most Linux crashes you can just reset X and be back at the login screen, where as a Windows crash needs a full reboot means that even if Linux did crash more often - which I don't think it does - you spend less time getting screwed
3) Really? I haven't found much of a difference on my Dell laptop.
1) No fonts for Linux compare with Microsoft's ClearType fonts (the C* fonts). And, Ubuntu's anti-aliasing still isn't nearly as good as Windows's or Mac OS X's, as of Ubuntu 8.
2) My Windows XP machine hasn't crashed once since I've had it (over two years). Ubuntu 6, 7, and 8 have all consistently crashed when resuming from hibernate on my laptop (Lenovo T60, one of the most common in the world).
3) Ubuntu 8 usually runs about 45 minutes to an hour less than Windows XP on my laptop's battery.
That's entirely possible. I've never used Ubuntu on a laptop setting.
From my experience with it, it works great if and only if you can find the right drivers. When it runs well, I like it more than Vista and most likely more than XP. But XP is certainly more supported overall, and that's another thing that's definitely worth considering.
