Ok, god I feel old now, but man, you youngsters forget history fast.

Let's go a bit _further_ back, some time in the 1960s. The telephone company AT&T was near the height of its power, with loads of cash to spend on research and development. (Ever heard of the name "Bell Labs"?) Anyway, it was there that the portable, multi-user, multi-tasking Unix operating system was created, along with the portable C language in which it was mainly implemented. And in that day, Unix was a relatively lightweight OS as well. This was a killer combination, ensuring that Unix could be adapted to all sorts of hardware relatively quickly.

Unfortunately for AT&T, anti-trust laws in the US made it extremely hard for them to expand into new businesses, such as selling computer operating systems. As such, Unix was used internally, as well as being presented to various universities with a license to use it for research purposes.

Still more unfortunately for AT&T, their baby managed to escape their grasp once it was given out to universities, particularly given that they had provided access to the source code. AT&T eventually tried to pull everything back, and put a trademark on the name "Unix", but that caused a minor rebellion; many folks tried to cobble together unix-like environments that didn't fall under AT&T's restrictions at this time, including Stallman. However, the most successful of these projects was not Stallman's, but rather the effort at Berkely (where items like vi, csh, curses, and the early versions of sendmail were developed).

Still, all these efforts were big projects at big organizations. (Including Stallman's GNU.) It was Andy Tannenbaum's Minix, the little OS you could install on your PC by yourself, that really got the ball rolling on making Unix something personal. Distributions began to evolve around Minix, using various bits and pieces derived from the BSD and GNU projects (as well as others).

My understanding is that the idea he could create his own replacement for Minix is what drove Torvalds to design his own kernel. And, by releasing it with an open-source license, Torvalds pretty much solved the last piece holding back wide adoption of the Unix OS as an alternative to, well, pretty much everything else in the world. (Berkeley tried to compete by making their BSD system more and more free of AT&T, culminating in the 4.4BSD release in the early 90s with 4.4BSD-lite being completely free, but they were never able to quite regain their lead over the Linux-based distributions. Still, BSD is extremely popular, and of course, is running beneath Apple's OSX and iOS operating systems.)

Stallman's drive to make the world open has, indeed, been a core reason for the success of the various GNU utilities and applications, as well as a major impetus behind the rise of Linux-based distributions. But it is not the _only_ factor. The reason why GNU utilities are so powerful, the reason why Linux is so portable, the reason why the OS as a whole is so useful, all go back to the design decisions of those ingenious Bell Labs folks back in the 60s.

I have no idea what either Torvalds or Stallman look like. I doubt almost anybody else does either. From the few Torvalds-written notes I've read over the years, I don't get the impression that Torvalds has the kind of suave social skills you attribute to him either. But it is true that he created a tiny Unix kernel and presented it to the world in a fairly agressive manner, and therefore was successful. (Certainly, Stallman's Hurd has never managed to pick up a lot of support, even though it's a direct competitor to Linux, and was started at approximately the same time.)

Long story short: yes, Linux distributions have lots and lots of GNU-derived software in them. But there is also lots of software in them that were never developed by the GNU project, and the GNU software itself almost all derives from work created elsewhere in the decades before Stallman started his effort.

So no, "GNU/Linux" is not the appropriate way to name a Linux distribution. You can call it that, but you're leaving out a whole lot of other folks who put their lives into the project.