Ok, you wanted to get a discussion rolling... So let's discuss your post, and your comments. Firstly I have to agree with many others here that the post couldn't be more shallow. The other one (about the best distros) was slightly better, although I disagree to your favourites, but that's mostly a matter of taste and expectations. I look at distros from a server point of view, hence I wouldn't recommend Debian and distros based on it, after they introduced a huge security flaw to OpenSSL last year by applying their own patches rather than sending them upstream, which invalidated all keys and certs, and also because they keep ignoring SELinux. For servers, I'd always recommend RHEL or CentOS (which is basically the same product), if you want to run Linux. I'm more of a BSD "child". But anyway, back to your post... :-)
Firstly, you made up some of the terms used, like "MS killers". While some wannabe experts (those who just discovered Linux for the desktop, and are excited that they managed to run through the installation without causing any major accidents) certainly _think_ Linux can replace M$, it definitely will not kill it. If you have a look at normal businesses, the vast majority runs Wintendo on their PCs. No distro will deny this fact, hence none will label itself a M$ Killer.
Secondly, just because LFS didn't work out for you doesn't make it bad distribution per se. Others rightly pointed out that its main purpose is education about how the bits and bobs fit together. Nobody would use LFS just to try out Linux on their desktops.
This also raises the question, for which target group you are writing here. (Which also applies for your best distros post.)
Certainly a business will have completely different expectations than someone who is just fed up with M$ for whatever reason. Servers require entirely different focus than custom-built desktops or notebooks (or even netbooks). An XBox owner might find specialised distros just perfect, whereas nobody else would possibly bother to have a look at them at all.
To say that embedded distros are crap, is just wrong. They are slimmed down and hopefully optimised for hardly more than one single purpose. Of course they are useless in any other than the intended scenario.
The thing I laughed most about was the "security" tag, though. Of course a distro isn't secure just because it claims to be. And it might indeed become a challenging target for hackers. That doesn't make it less secure though. Or do you think, just because a distro does not show much interest in security (like your favourite Ubuntu, which per default comes without SELinux, and iptales enabled without any traffic restriction at all, just to give an example) is more secure, because all hackers challenge another OS/distro? Very interesting thought. :-)
Have you bothered to have a look at OpenBSD (not Linux, I know)? They claim to be one of the most secure systems out there, and they are. This is one reason why you find a lot of BSD-based solutions in the networking field, many of them slimmed down and optimised, and used in an embedded way (the BSD license being another strong reason for manufacturers of appliances).
To cut a long story short, if you point your finger at bad or even the worst distributions, you have to be much more specific, and you cannot assume that everybody else expects the same from their Linux distribution.
What you can say for sure is that any Linux distribution which is not (or very rarely) maintained anymore, is bad, because an insecure system cannot be good by any means.
