I think that they over complicate things. There are 3 basic concerns for choosing an operating system.

One: Does it work with ALL of your hardware, including wireless and entertainment devices? Is it stable? Is your computer powerful enough to handle it without slowing to a crawl? (especially older machines)

Two: How user friendly is the distro together with its desktop? (Of course, hard core scientists and system administrators can skip this)

For the typical "Johnny Q. Public" who just lost his epic novel to a M$ virus, ease of use is important. After all, Johnny won't buy a set of wrenches that feel cheap and don't handle well, why an operating system that does that?

Three: How secure is it? Does it have a firewall? Can the disk partition be encrypted easily during installation with a GUI? If so, how strong is this encryption?

(Obviously, Linux is far more secure then Windows "out of the box", but there are still differences.)

In terms of Fedora, its only bleeding edge if you enable the rawhide, experimental or testing repositories. Just use conservative repositories + livna for multimedia support and the stability issues go away.

Fedora also works with all my hardware, including both printers and I set up an encrypted crypto-luks partition effortlessly with a wizard.