The name "Mandrake" should give you a hint that this is mostly an update of a document that was written when Mandriva was still called Mandrake.
Ubuntu, by the terminology of that white-paper chose to become a completely separate fork, and hence has to replicate much of Debian's infrastructure. Ubuntu's creators had their reasons for doing so, and this is perfectly legitimate.
However, this white-paper is about Debian-based distributions that do not want to pay this high price. It is about providing them tools to maintain their own subsets of Debian in a productive as possible way.