I think its kind of silly to get mad about this, because GNOME is much similar and great for newbies to Linux. GNOME also looks great, and I personally prefer GNOME when I am working on a Linux Desktop.
But whats silly is Ubuntu is just a distribution of Linux, its open source and its really easy to play around with. There is no doubt in my mind that if you really want KDE 4 on a Ubuntu machine then you should be able to find some hacker who will show you how to do it (if you don't already know how).