I've looked at pretty installers like that of Ubuntu and Fedora, and they are all very easy and slick. But whenever I install Debian, I don't really see how much harder it is to use, though it's a lot uglier.
Anyways, what triggered this post is the following tit-bit:
d-i [Debian Installer] is the very first thing many of our users see, and has a huge range of uses, from simple desktop installs to massive corporate deployments; it's unspeakably important that it works well, and it's a testament to its design that it's been able to trundle along without actually very much serious refactoring for the best part of five years now.
In addition, this tool (or rather, a set of tools) also happens to be rock-solid, and its great reliability and ease-of-use gets admiration from me on each install... I've done dozens, with not one instance of data loss.