I don't believe people would have dropped Ubuntu (in general) for not using systemd (but I'd not bet on the word anyone). My point was that Ubuntu went with the fold even if people would not have dropped them for sticking to their own system.

The benefits of that unification are very, very tangible for package authors/maintainers - they now have to write just one flavor of a service file. And that is a great thing(tm) for the Linux community as a whole - well worth my own gripes with systemd itself.