Well put, in my mind Ubuntu will always be a great gateway drug to Debian. Ubuntu community did a fantastic job to popularize deb ecosystem even though it is often criticized for not contributing enough upstream. I can't imagine anyone using Debian as their first Linux distro, Ubuntu (and it's derivatives) on the other hand is the Linux distro. Debian is arguably more stable and technically might be better implemented but Ubuntu has won over the average user because of ease of use and helpful communities around it.