I am impressed. The install was completely painless: pecking on Enter a few times. It auto-detected all the hardware, the network, and it even detected the Windows partition and offered to make GRUB dual-boot. After restarting once, I came to a fancy login screen in X, complete with sound and everything -- which means it must've not only autodetected my sound, but also my video drivers. Everything just worked, even with my funny hardware. There are even kernel modules loaded for thermal management. Props to the debian-installer team.
I stuck in a CD and a CD player popped up. I clicked on "Multimeda" then "CD Ripper" and ripped a CD, then right-clicked on the folder and picked "add to music library" and Rhythymbox loaded it up perfectly. I already know that plugging in my digital camera pops up a "Do you want to import these photos?" dialog, too.
And it's still Debian! After a minor hiccup (needed to tell apt to use all software, and not just the "supported" core install), I could apt-get install logjam and type this post.
However, now I want Firefox 1.0 and it's not in Ubuntu. Most of the stuff Google finds indicates people are just using Debian packages. What's the point of Ubuntu, then? All of the good impressions Ubuntu has given me are just the benefits of the new fancy debian-installer.