What draws most people to Ubuntu, either as a desktop or a server, is how it’s been designed to be as close to the “It Just Works” experience as possible. This is not the same as dumbing-down; I don’t know of a single harried administrator who wouldn’t want to be able to, say, provision twenty servers without having to manually pull the levers on each one. More here

If Canonical can make this into the draw for Ubuntu Server, they’ll be able to carve out that much more of a niche for it. When Ubuntu Server first showed up, a great many people shrugged: what was the point, exactly? How would this stand apart from Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) (or CentOS), or SuSE, or you-name-it? Ease of deployment is one thing, but it’s becoming clearer that Ubuntu is shooting for something above and beyond that: ease of deployment not only for current technologies (email, file/print services, directories), but also for all the emergent tech (e.g., clouds) that people want to start working with immediately.