Uhm, you seem a bit confused. If you run Debian _stable_ (currently Woody, aka Debian 3.0) you're NOT going to get the newest and hottest. This is because things generally need a year or two to be deemed worthy of the title _stable_. So as a user with no 99.9999999% uptime critical server applications running, you should NOT EVER EVER EVER run the stable distribution :-D :-P
Normal people with more than 45 minutes of Linux experience should ALWAYS go for the testing branch of Debian. This is where all the things that seems to work, but needs more testing before it can be released as "24/7 uptime critical server ####". I personally never go below "unstable", which gives me access to XFree 4.3, gcc 3.2.3, glibc 2.3.1 etc. I don't see how that makes my system "no up to date". ENOUGH WITH THE ####ING FUD, FOR CRYING OUT LOUD. CHECK YOUR FACTS BEFORE SAYING ANYTHING ABOUT ANOTHER DISTRO. I make a rule of never saying anything bad about other peoples choices. I just say that I would personally never change away from Debian now that I know how it works. Because I get that same feeling as from AmigaOS. I know what's going on! ;-)