Right, but most users don't care about that at all. Particularly for non-technical users who are only ever going to use the GUI frontend to the package manager,

Right, but most users don't care about that at all. Particularly for non-technical users who are only ever going to use the GUI frontend to the package manager, almost none of the underlying system matters at all. In a world that has almost completely standardized on grub, systemd, fhs, etc with major applications being shipped in container-like blobs (snap, flatpak, appimage) that mirror a Windows-style setup.exe workflow and then bypass the filesystem and package manager and talk right to the kernel anyway... yeah, if you're an end user, your distro choice doesn't much matter. Pick whatever has out of the box drivers for your laptop's trackpad.