I just spent a few hours installing Debian Testing on a 2 year old macbook. If you start with a net install you are mostly on your own, but starting with one of the live cds makes it pretty useable from the start. I think the big difference between the two is installing proprietary drivers. Wireless works out of the box on Ubuntu, but I have to install linux-firmware-nonfree and another broadcom package to get WiFi working on Debian.

I just tell myself that the extra work I put into a Debian install makes me more knowledgable about how the system actually works.