Um, KDE 4.2 looks a lot like Vista (as sad as I am to say it, it's true), but *KDE* has changed in the last year or so. KDE 4.2 is very flashy, and it looks like that out of the box. If you have a 3D graphics card, it enables a few effects by default, and it has other things like real transparency. It's Gnome that hasn't changed much in the last 5 or so years.
One does need to note that no one actually has a real idea of how many computers run Windows, Linux, or Mac OS X. Mac OS X is probably the easiest to figure out, and Linux is most certainly the most difficult to track. How can you track something that is given away freely and has so many different distributions?
Also, I don't know why anyone has to "get hald going" because when I plug in a camera or a usb drive or my mp3 player, KDE pops up a little notification and I can click on it to open the device. I hardly ever *have* to pop down to the command line to do any system work on my computer.
As a gentoo user, I had to install hald (gentoo distribution are for those that like to put everything together) and made it run at startup. But for the ubuntu guys I guess, as long as it works out of the box