Well, I just installed Fedora 13 (from the DVD) on a virtual machine under VMware (which is it seems, my religion). The boot process is quite pretty, with the familiar service firstboot that gives me a nice GUI to add an account before the system runs gdm and I login. This idea is very old and goes back to Red-Hat 8.0 Desktop, which was the release with the bluecurve. Only this time there is no terminal on the panel, which I find strange since this is Linux afterall, and it has the king of shells (bash). Why keep that a distance?
It didn't install me a compiler by default yet I chose to install from a giant DVD. This is a big red mark in my book, in reality you shouldn't just include a compiler, but keep one and a libc in busybox, forcing users to write their own /bin/init before getting to use the system. This might actually make Linux elite again, because when there is no compiler by default I feel the sad aura of a million unskilled freetards. Yet, it was also incredibly easy to install all the development tools from the GUI.
The System > Administration menu is a bit cluttered. You find HTTP and NFS under "Server Settings" but Samba and probably others if I had them installed under System. This is pretty common behavior on gnome desktops. The GUI tools are pretty neat overall, if I wasn't so in love with Debian Squeeze I would very nearly convert. Seems alright, but I don't really have anything to use it for to give it a real test.