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One distro to rule them all.

I have not met one person who disagrees with the fact that Debian Stable is stable. Outdated sometimes, but never unstable.

Always outdated, I'd say.

I'm no Debian expert, but I think Debian sticks to version numbers (like for instance Red Hat does) which makes it indeed stable as in "predictable", but then Red Hat does more backporting of packages from newer releases, often to increase its stability.

And sticking with older versions is actually something that I think makes Debian unstable sometimes. A recent example I stumbled upon, was a problem in the OpenISCI initiator: it didn't take me long before I found some bugs that were already solved. Another advantage of the more active backporting that Red Hat does, is that you get to benefit from some new features (like with Xen, being able to run 64-bit next to 32-bit: I'm afraid we'll have to wait for that with Debian for the next stable release? And cyrus 2.3 was released I think just before the freeze of etch, but it still has 2.2 and it seems like it will stay like that. Although during sarge I believe there was an major upgrade from mysql that I was surprised about, that was actually an example where Debian didn't stick to older versions - which is good, but also problematic in this case.
We've had serious problems with kernel images in the past too, problems with (too new) hardware that just were not solved in Debians stock kernels...)

Oh well, that said: I like Debian, I just wished it had the release cycle and freshness/packaging policy of other distributions sometimes. But it serves us really well, for some machines we pick Debian, others get Red Hat (or FreeBSD, or, or...)

Stable, Testing and Unstable means different things to Debian than other distros.

Stable: It's literally stable. Version numbers don't bump, security patches only. Great for servers and production environments. It's constantly cooked for security && stability and this cooking pays of as we see.

Testing: Your $fav_distro release is Debian testing. Version numbers bump slowly but solid and dependable with no killing security holes. Hundred days of uptime. Sometimes it's a bit outdated (a week or so) but stability pays it off. Great for non-critical / casual desktop.

Unstable: Cutting edge, massively updated but not secure as testing (not to mention stable). Has big security holes sometimes. Great for grabbing latest amarok or kernel if the current one doesn't support a thing or two, nothing more. If you are just curious, update to unstable once in every three months then wait for testing to catch up (catches in ~1 month) if your system is secured using external security mechanisms (firewalls and such).

...and don't forget: debian is not an OOB thing. You make debian what it is. Like Slack, Gentoo or Arch. (I've installed mine as etch beta-1 and it's now lenny. I've cloned it to my office PC instead of installing a fresh one and it's working flawlessly at home and office.)

Also please remember that debian is just a distro which placed itself to the higher, geeker side of the spectrum. They've made their choices and they're very good at them. I beleive that Debian vs. (*buntu, suse, mandriva, etc) comparisons are a bit apples to oranges since the secondary part has different goals than Debian-like ones (geek, technical vs. mainstream, easy to use).