Not really.
"Fedora is primary a testing ground for RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), so it is not allowed to flow too far away from its main sponsor. That is why you will never see all those fancy newbie stuff."
This angle is overplayed. That's not what Fedora is. Red Hat also doesn't entirely control Fedora, so Red Hat really can't 'not allow' people to add useful apps. With the current Fedora process, it'd be entirely possible for an app to go from not being in Fedora to being included in the default desktop spin without anyone @redhat.com having to be actively involved, or even give approval, at any stage.
Fedora really isn't 'primarily' a 'testing ground' for RHEL. It's a desktop Linux distribution whose development is sponsored by Red Hat. It is the upstream for RHEL, that's not the same thing as being a 'testing ground', and Fedora has a distinctly different focus in terms of usage from RHEL. Fedora is *not* a server distribution, no-one would really recommend you run production servers on Fedora. Fedora is more aimed at desktop use. In a sense it's intended to be the desktop that someone who pilots RHEL servers might use, maybe, but that's just a rough approximation.
Fedora has tons of apps and features aimed at being useful to the desktop user. The inclusion of the Shotwell photo management app in this release, for instance, which is mentioned in the release documentation, is hardly a feature of interest to your average server maintainer. =) Nor is 3D support for NVIDIA graphics cards.
Fedora devs contribute extensively to the development of GNOME, and of tools such as system-config-printer (for printer management), gnome-color-manager (for color management), upower (power management)...Fedora has tons of devs working on features that are of direct interest to desktop users.
Fedora 13 includes a new social networking app, much as Ubuntu does; it just hasn't been as aggressively promoted. We chose Vino rather than Gwibber, due to Gwibber's rather heavy dependency on Ubuntu's cloud stuff.