Depends on the context with which you are arguing, I suppose. In this case it might have been more correct to argue FreeBSD vs. Debian. I still stress, though, that the difference is still a notable one; even though Debian may be a tight and clean distribution it's still considered "GNU/Linux" - FreeBSD is just FreeBSD. The BSD's do have some cross pollination but they aren't united under a single umbrella as all the distributions of GNU/Linux are. Debian is sort of stepping away from this by building a distribution that matches GNU user land with the FreeBSD kernel.
I haven't personally used Debian that much, so I can't reliably argue for or against it (but I've heard good things); my arguments generally stem from my lovely experiences with FreeBSD and my generally frustrating experiences with GNU/Linux (no new argument here, everything I said in this sentence is said in my above post).
Having used Debian (a whole lot) and Fedora (just a little), I've found that, although they have some large differences between them, each of them presents a cohesive system within itself. Despite the package sources coming from disparate places. I know for a fact that both distributions patch their (external) packages so that they fit into their respective guidelines (IE, no junk in /opt, config files in directories in /etc, etc.).
I've used OpenBSD in the past--even got the source code from CVS and compiled the whole thing up. I've seen how all the code is organized and it is nice. I definitely see how it's cohesive from the source code's point of view. But I don't see how that produces a more cohesive system from the user's point of view.