None of the people I've helped out have had 2 monitors (I doubt any of them know it's even possible, or would want a second monitor even if they did), so I've been able to avoid that problem so far.
For my own personal purposes (I run Arch Linux, but it's much the same), I've set up a shell script that, based on which monitors it detects as being connected, runs a specific xrandr command to configure my monitors. This works for switching between home (two external monitors, disable laptop monitor), work (enable one external monitor and the laptop monitor), and else (enable only laptop monitor).
For those few times when I have a nonstandard monitor setup (usually when giving a presentation somewhere), I start out with the 'else' configuration and use ARandR[0] to manually add any additional monitors.
Ubuntu has excellent repositories; just can't bring myself to switch away. So I started looking at alternatives. I spent a week trying to use Kubuntu before realizing it was a lost cause. I had a few bad experiences with Xubuntu in the past so I skipped it, but Lubuntu works perfectly - even in this virtualbox environment running on Windows 7.
I do think a lot of people will be put off by having to learn xrandr, but not me. I also replaced the lack of any tiling mechanism with Pytyle.