Debian Edition aside, the things people complain about are generally things that Mint removes; in fact, looking at the three bullet points from the original article:
* Unity - Completely ignored in Mint, in favor of MATE (Gnome 2 fork) and Cinnamon (Gnome 3 fork, I believe?)
* Amazon Search - removed
* Mark Shuttleworth - Only upstream where no one has to care about him
+1 Mint. I used Ubuntu, not Debian, because things "just worked." Ubuntu over time seemed to get slower and more intrusive, so I tried out Mint. It is fast, not over complex, and things like media and devices Just Work. I'm a fan of the Cinnamon interface, although in practice I use a minimal tiling window manager like i3 or wmii.
I'm a big fan of the Debian way of doing things. Next time I have an excuse I'll try LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition.)
Check the repos. Mint is Ubuntu + some extras.