I was just thinking the same thing. 14 on Slicehost and only 1 on Linode seems like an odd ratio considering the similarities of the services provided and price point.
SH really does have a strong brand. Initially, I wasn't really aware of the 64 bit issue, and saw that lots of people were happy with them, so I went with them over Linode without any real concrete reasons. That turned out to be a mistake, as Linode is significantly cheaper for what I need, yet still seem to run a quality operation.
Though I'm still itching to find something just like Slicehost but with gigabit on the private network.