At the end of the day, its all linux.
That's true for Linux as a desktop system on a PC, but there's way more to Linux than just that. I find it nice that I can use the same system on a whole range of hardware... m68k, mips, arm, powerpc, amd64, ia32, hppa, sparc, sh and more. I run Gentoo on mips and arm based router boards, old m68k amigas and macs, various NAS boxes, wii, gamecube, xbox... pretty much anything. And Gentoo goes beyond Linux, you can use portage with BSD as well, and you can use it to build and maintain software on OSX, Solaris (and its spinoffs) etc.
Also, not all first time Linux users are alike, why is it wrong to have a distro that has different goals and different target than that of "most users"?
