In my experience, the people on the Ubuntu forums only know how to solve trivial problems. There are tons of searches in Google that result in links to the forums where somebody is asking "Hey, this is my situation, can anybody help me?" only to see a response that is irrelevant or no response at all. I had to dig through the X.org wiki, which isn't terribly good documentation, to figure out how to disable mouse acceleration (after experimenting with where to put the settings).
Regarding the article: many of these points seem really vague or really nit-picky, like the bit about drive encryption.
I also agree with you about Ubuntu not trying to be Windows. I think they want to instill the paradigm if you're going to change a setting, be prepared to do it as a superuser or root ahead of time. Linux security isn't going to change to be more like Windows security.