My experience is generally it doesn't just work straight away unless it's something I've hammered out myself
I am also using one of the more DIY distros and window managers though, so I wouldn't expect it to without some attention from me to get it hammered out first
That said, once it's hammered out it continues to work exactly the way I want it to, it doesn't spy on me, it doesn't shove ads down my throat every 5 minutes
Would be an interesting experiment to see how non techy windows/mac users would get on if you just put stock mint/pantheon on their systems but I get the feeling it would not be as smooth as if they just had the thing everyone knows all the flaws of already
This is more just that it's customisable, doesn't look like anything except a terminal until you put a desktop environment on it
(more or less all the options look better than windows but I think the reason for that is they're options and people tend to choose the one they like the look of)