Hardly. If anything it's "like windows" in the sense that there's very little fiddling with config files to get things working and do "superuser" things. You aren't required to drop to the console to do many things.

Ubuntu is what has made me a heavy Linux user, and is the primary reason so many systems on my current project at work run Linux. Not simply because it is easier, but because the customization time is so much shorter as I can customize what I need instead of customizing things so they work like I expect.

I suppose it depends on your goals, but Fedora (rather, Redhat before Fedora) and Gentoo were two of the primary causes of me keeping Linux at arms length for a long time. There's nothing more you can really get out of Linux in Fedora or Gentoo than you can out of Ubuntu, except maybe for some distribution specific stuff.