Canonical is being funded by a billionaire with an explicit goal of making Linux user-friendly. It didn't exactly generate that motivation intrinsically; it was injected by economic force from without.
All of the major distros do it - the biggest irritation I have with Red Hat and Debian are their package managers - both rpm and apt add a layer of cruft I have to learn without really improving on tarballs, except that they are easier for people who can't be bothered moving untarred files to the correct directories. And since the "correct" directories are different on different distros, they are a royal pain when working with more than one distro.