@AC
Thanks, but I am well aware that Linux is the kernel not the distro. To the average man on the street Linux is what you install and it comes in different distro flavours, but to them it's all "Linux". It may not be technically correct but that's life.
With regards lightweight distros, this kind of ignores the point I was making and that is that people often accuse Windows of bloat but the various distros all seem to be going the same way. It should also be noted that some of the other desktops can be much more of a pain in the arse to use than Gnome or KDE. I certainly found XCFE not to my liking after using Gnome. The "lesser hardware" of which I speak is a 3GHz P4. That is not really a low-spec machine but the slowdown has been noticeable and extra memory required.
The question is not "can I find a distro to work on this box" but rather "why won't the next version of my current distro work or why does it run like shit?"
As I said - and I stand by this statement as a user of Win7, OSX and 10.04LTS - if Linux distros are merely going to emulate the feature bloat of Windows (albeit a step or two behind size-wise) then users may as well just carry on using what they are familiar with. It holds little attraction in this regard especially given the bundling of <latest windows> with new hardware.
It seems that in order to try and attract new users they are treading the fine line of trying to feature match the system they target to attract its users without becoming a mirror of it. Maybe not all distros do this but the more popular ones certainly do.
I believe the Linux ecosystem is fine and doesn't need to mirror the bloat and empty wow-graphics arena as it has it's own unique selling points: the community; the security; the price; the freedom. With the update to 10.04LTS I think the Ubuntu desktop look-and-feel is pretty much there when compared to previous releases. It just needs a more coordinated marketing perhaps - see how eager MS were to keep XP alive when Linux distros were shipped with netbooks? They soon killed off that worthy proposal.
All said, I think Canonical are doing a fine job.