Their users are, de facto, locked into a few vendors who, because of this arrangement, can charge excessive rent. In part this is because of a tiny number of critical components that do not have libre licenses; in part it is because these vendors provide technical leadership to the larger community in forms that actively prevent organizing a truly libre OS.
I think that RH and Canonical are very problematic for the community. They are a mixed bag containing a lot of good, but also containing some critical problems (for the cause of freedom). So I like to speak frankly about those problems, when I can.
Why not point out viable alternatives while making the criticisms of those two? Debian has a pedigree of broad, long-term professional use and is 100% free in both senses (barring a couple of firmware binaries in the 'speech' sense).
Is Debian really 100% free? The Linux Kernel itself isn't 100% free, it has proprietary blobs. Sure, they can be removed, but I don't think Debian removes them by the default.
Anyways, I do agree that Debian should be the distribution the FSF should support instead of gNewSense.
Which community? The Linux community and the free open source community or the Free software community?
I think it is certainly an arguable question for the Free software/GNU community although I expect most could agree that they are bet positive for Linux and open source in general.
Given suitable hardware that doesn't need firmware blobs, distros like Fedora are 100% free software. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is also 100% free - you can download all the source from ftp.redhat.com and check that yourself.