If you use their "Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel", it's actually a totally different (and much newer) kernel version than the one that ships with the equivalent

If you use their "Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel", it's actually a totally different (and much newer) kernel version than the one that ships with the equivalent RHEL release. Interestingly, they also provide it across OEL versions, so you can use the more modern kernel with the horribly outdated RHEL userland of your choice. For instance, UEK R4 is based on the 4.1.12 Linux kernel. RHEL 7 ships with 3.10.0. It still makes me nauseous to deal with Oracle, but providing support for a relatively modern kernel release is a step in the right direction. Now if they could shorten RHEL's time between major releases and get them out on a consistent timeframe, that would be another big step in the right direction. Of course then you're practically shipping Ubuntu.