Same for Ubuntu Gnome. There's a few addons (or plugins, or whatever they call them) that I install to suite my preferences, but I can do a clean install + additional packages + tweak to my needs in under an hour. If you don't know the package names you'll want, maybe double that. The past few upgrades have also worked flawlessly for me, which makes it even easier.

That said, I intentionally purchase hardware that's known to work well with Linux (if you buy a system with all Intel chipsets, you'll probably be fine). Also, the power management is still abysmal. I still have to tinker with powertop to get battery life comparable to other OS's.

Amen to that. After doing some magic with powertop, I get about 5 hours out of my Thinkpad X201 9-cell battery, which is still less that the 7 on Windows they claim. But it guess the battery is getting older too, I've never replaced it (it has about 2 years)

I hated Unity at first, enough to stick with 10.04 when I ran Ubuntu (I was never impressed with Kubuntu/Xubuntu/Lubuntu, there was always something broken somewhere in all of those). But I finally gave it a go in 14.04, and it has vastly improved. It may still not be your cup of tea, but in my mind at least it's better than Gnome 3 and is worth a look.

That said, for my money you can't beat Mint with Xfce for a quick and easy casual GNU/Linux box. I always skip Xfce's compositor and install Compton for tear-free window dragging and video watching (Nvidia-specific issue I believe), but otherwise the default install is very good.