The reviews are slowly coming in for Ubuntu 5.10 This one by Mathew Newton of PC World is fairly good.
He points to lacking wifi management support that Network Manager does in Fedora. Unfortunately that software is beta. This is a significant and useful feature request. Most users probably have only one wifi network to connect to though.
He also complains about the the menu editor. Honestly I don't think I've ever sceen a newbie edit a menu. Personally I haven't missed that feature - I simply drop the config files in the right directory or launch the app from the command line. smeg is installed by default - so I don't know what his review is referring to.
Other goodies that most people seem to like:
* replacement of xpdf with evince
* ftp now works in nautilus
Other stuff that most reviewers seem to take for granted is better power and driver support. Plus Badger has bunch of system management tools.
Looks to me like they were overly ambitious.
Personally I would add simple command line tools for managing services, dialup etc. These things are not used so much - the debian command line tools work and they are easy to use remotely on a server. Plus they are small and don't take much space. Another track would be to have all the admin tools using GtkHTML so that they are dual rich client and web client available.