Wget, my understanding, is available to install. It may come default with Ubuntu, but it's still a separate package that is installed. This is no different than any debian based system.

Locate is also a separate application and I have worked on many linux that do not have it. Relying on locate to find your files is a bad idea.

I agree that less and fdisk are lacking, from what I've seen, and this is unfortunate as less was supposed to have replaced more some time ago, and sfdisk is no where near as intuitive and easy as fdisk.

Your typical end-user is not going to be using fdisk/sfdisk/parted/gparted/etc, however.