I love Arch as much as the next guy, but their default font experience is awful. The biggest headache of using it was constantly fighting/maintaining patched cairo/freetype from AUR (because they'd occasionally conflict with a newer version of some other package). And on top of that you'd have a ton of other packages with baked-in broken fonts like Firefox, xulrunner and Open Office.

When it comes to fonts and text rendering, all users firmly belong into two groups: the 1st group would post a screenshot of their screen where the 'd' and 'p' are rendered with double line thickness at the tip of their curves, and then claim "my fonts are fine". The 2nd group would consider that unusable.

What Ubuntu excelled at (and still does) is to bring Linux to the 2nd group of people, which is a lot larger than the 1st one. All Canonical's questionable achievements like Unity, upstart and Bazaar have been easily eclipsed by them noticing and taking care of the elephant in the room: readability of text on user's screen. They fixed it by patching freetype, providing sensible defaults for fontconfig and by developing an excellent set of default fonts.

Sorry for the long rant, this is Arch birthday after all. Arch rocks! Long live Arch! :)