As I mentioned in my post, Mint (or the Cinnamon GUI in general) is very Win7-inspired and easy to teach to someone who's only used Windows in the past. I personally run Ubuntu LTS with Cinnamon on my own laptop (since I needed a newer kernel than Mint provides), before that I used standard Mint. Since it's Ubuntu underneath, it has the same amount of supported software.

I used to use Xubuntu, which is a cracking OS with a GUI comparable to Gnome 2, but I came to like the Cinnamon GUI more than XFCE.