The ftp thing is one of my main complaints in Linux. No good GUI-based ftp client. Your best bet is to VMWare or WINE Filezilla.

As of Ubuntu 5.10 all my hardware was recognized by default. I only had to edit fstab to automatically mount my external drive at bootup. Although I'm pretty sure there's a way to do it without editing files.

KDE and Gnome are very similar nowadays and there's definite cross-compatibility that the developers work on. Like Unne said, basic things like menu items appearing right in both desktop environments and system tray icons working in both, are realities now.

I'll agree that Photoshop is a better image editing program than The GIMP, but the $400 difference between the two pretty much voids that argument for the common consumer.

Mirage: I guarantee you that if you were to get a group of people to look at a Windows desktop (as heavily modified as you could get it) and at a Linux desktop (using Beryl), nine out of ten people would be more impressed with the Linux desktop. Better font rendering, bigger icons, smoother window decorations. Not to mention 3D desktops, blur effects, animation effects and transparency effects. Hell I could make it rain on my desktop as an entirely useless feature, but it looks awesome.

Vista is getting closer with its 3D desktop switching and transparency effects, but what Vista is going to do has already been done on the Linux desktop and then some.