While I don't very much like the *code* that Poettering contributes (pulseAudio took a LONG while to become stable), I see sense in a lot of his arguments:

1) SystemV initscripts are fine for systems that were designed 20 years ago. Things have changed quite a bit now.
2) After seeing some of the Apple launchctl things in action, I want some on Linux!
3) If we stick to POSIX, we might as well decide to throw in the towel, break out the old Slackware 1.0 distros and grow beards. If we can design a better interface/system that's more future proof, then DO IT.
4) Letting Upstart/SysV/OpenRC and whatever compete is *not* a good thing. It's the equivalent of having 3 incomplete kernels that allow you to run your audio, graphics or disk, one at a time.
5) Turns out pulseAudio got better AFTER PEOPLE FIXED IT UP. The architecture and the idea wasn't busted, but the execution was, for a long time.

The only reason Red Hat is upstream is because they contribute so damn much to the code. But, as Mark Shuttleworth said, Canonical contributes users and bugreports (sometimes directly to Red Hat, hilariously). Turns out, you have less control over code than the authors, go figure.

Finally, from my point of view, Unity and GNOME 3 are both abominations that should be killed with fire. I stand 100% behind Linus's statements about compatibility and ABI breakage. The fact that your app can only run on a specific distribution with a specific set of libraries is very rarely a good way to keep guys interested in developing for your desktop.

http://wiki.debian.org/systemd
http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/Systemd

Strange, last I heard was that Debian added it as an *alternative*. Gentoo's had their own initsystem (they switched to openrc right about when I left 'em), but, to be honest, the average Gentoo user could probably boot his PC just by flicking the power randomly to clock the bits into RAM.

Your viewpoint on how Ubuntu and Canonical contributes back to the community notwithstanding, there seems to be a stark difference between the management style of Red Hat and that of Canonical.

The perception raised with Unity is that Canonical has decided to diverge from upstream more and more: this is evident from the problems that the Debian project (which contributes the majority of code to Ubuntu) is facing, as well as GNOME and the dissent with the upcoming signed boot EFI implementations.

Red Hat (and the Fedora project) is trying to prevent the balkanization of Linux userspace with projects like systemd, which only Ubuntu rejects.

Red Hat's business model seems to be very successful, and Canonical, despite it's massive desktop market share, doesn't seem to be able to match it in reputation or revenue. Would you attribute this to Red Hat's deeper involvement in the kernel community and higher technical skills?

If you look at the timeline of the amd64 architecture: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64#History_of_AMD64

Then it only took 8 years to make a 64-bit port from the date of the first available amd64 machine. If you take into account the date of the first full spec released to the public, it's almost 11 years.

Now if only complex software like the Linux Kernel could be ported in shorter time....