I've never understood the Red Hat hate, either. They were the first commercial distro that was fully Open Source, and they've contributed more to the kernel, and Gnome, and a number of other projects than any other organization, and continues to be the single biggest contributor to a large number of projects.

I generally can't afford RHEL, though I've deployed it in the past for clients who wanted a commercially supported distro, but I get most of the benefits of RHEL by running Scientific Linux or CentOS on my servers. And I run Fedora on my laptop, which is still my favorite desktop distro, by far (I keep trying Ubuntu, every couple of revisions, and finding way too many things to hate about it).

Anyway, I think Red Hat's success is a great thing, particularly for companies trying to make a living in the Open Source world (which mine happens to be).