> Red Hat's success was primarily based on the critical mass of support behind it, not because it was the best distribution.

May be true, but they're given so much distribution independent code back, that I'm really glad they made it. It even seems that they contribute more to desktop Linux (GNOME, PulseAudio, systemd, kernel devs etc.), than Canonical does, (they seem to focus on Ubuntu-specific solutions mostly), which is pretty neat for a server vendor.