Canonical pulls the plug on Kubuntu

Entirely agree. I have been a KDE user since 1998 (with intermittent escapes to Gnome and GNUstep) and I almost gave up at KDE 4.1. But I'd say for the last two years, I did not meet a major problem except the classical wireless manager issue (and that is not a KDE problem), very easily fixed. And in my workplace, more and more users are selecting KDE over Gnome when they receive their new machine.