Felin Greenleaf
So uh...
I'm gonna be kinda on subject here?
I hated Fedora just because of the "AHGAD NO CLOSED-SOURCE ANYTHING ******** YOU FELIN'S 30+ GB OF MP3S"
Actually Felin....if you hit up the 3rd party RPMFusion repository (for FC 7 and above) and add it to YUM, you'll get the support you want....you'll get the g-streamer good, bad, and ugly packages which will allow playback of mp3's on Rhythmbox/Banshee/whatever jukebox program you use. If you think that G-Streamer is total s**t, Fusion offers the entire line of xine codecs as well.
If I were you...I'd ditch PackageKit, and just do either smart or pup. I just don't really care for the PK front-end like I probably should.
Actual real Sun Java is the only problem...you have to play with that to get it to work..Although, OpenJDK/IceTea works good enough.
aaaand...probably installing proprietary graphics drivers are a little more work in Fedora...since Fedora doesn't have something like Envy.
Adobe Flash is easy, because it has a YUM installer on the site.
All you'd need is Yum Extender to act like Synaptic and you're good to go.
Those three make up the core of the ubuntu/kubuntu/xubuntu restricted extras package.
Ubuntu just simplifies and compartmentalizes it for you. That's probably the downside to Fedora...if you want restricted extras you have to look and do a little work for it.
Additionally...if you want a more stable version of Fedora, then you should definitely do CentOS, it has long term support on all their versions. The only difference in 3rd party repos are, you can't really use RPMFusion, you'll have to port yourself over to RPMForge, and then the RedHat Club EPEL repository for all the fun stuff.
The downside is, with that many repos, you'll have to get Yum Extender, load up yum-fastestmirror, and yum-priorities, and edit yum.conf...*inhales* Then edit the numeric value to give priorities to your repos, so that there isn't any overlapping or possiblilities of ******** up dependencies.
YUM for the most part will keep you from doing that, but it does help to have priorities so it doesn't look as cluttered when you're in Yumex.
Oh..and also, you'll have to configure fuse and samba to get any NTFS drives to appear, and/or see other terminals on the network.
It can't be much more work than the stuff you did while running Arch.
Only other one that I would say that requires a lot of your attention would be Slackware, since there isn't any automated dependency checking.
In Red Hat's defense....Fedora 10 Cambridge is pretty nice. If they had support for intel integrated graphics (the intel i810 driver) I'd be using it right now.