You ever need to talk to an EMC array?
RH or Suse.

You gotta run Oracle?
RH or Suse.

You wanna run SAS?
RH or Suse.

You need to run (insert 3rd party software here)?
Most likely RH or Suse.

You need to present to a board of directors on why
Linux makes a good business case to the back-office,
and how you have a line of support they can trust?
RH or Suse.

In almost every example, you can force the debian to work.

But the 1st hint of a problem, the vendor laughs at you and
you are screwed. You then save the day, kill yourself
working amazing hours, and pull it out of a hat.

Won't matter.

If you don't put forth a migration plan to RH or Suse
at that moment you'll be out of a job in a few months,
replaced by the RH or Suse proponent who can point to
the corp support.

Or worse, Windows.

If you are serious about Linux adminning in a real corp
environment, there are several types.

I'll ignore the small mom/pop shop that you can get away with
anything and they aren't using it for anything other than
native stuff, ie: Samba, email, proxy, firewall, Postgres,
etc. All the things you can do on any Linux system, and
the ability to use apt-get is a wonderful.

There is the dot com / tech product / core techie environment.
Trying to save money, and willing to take risks. Not that
I think think debian is more of a risk, just that from a commercial
support OUTSIDE the org perspective, it doesn't rate. If you
need RH compat, but unwilling to pay, then you can use White Box.

And White Box will still require RH skills.

There is the technically advanced environment, home brew code,
has at LEAST 3 admins (2 active while one on vacation) who know
their shit, and does not require 3rd party apps on all boxes.

At that point, they can setup a farm of debian boxes for their
home brew / Open Source code, and a couple of isolated RH or Suse
boxes to run any required 3rd party apps. You still need the RH/Suse
ability, and it is still critical, but hopefully it is low volume
enough that your missing RH skills are not a killer.

Then there is the corp env like mine. Linux is one of multiple OS
environments, we got Solaris, windows and MVS as well. We'd like to
minimize the number of admins, and we'd like to not have to deal with
multiple distributions. We want tech support, and we have to be able
to point to the next step in the support chain who will help us fix
problems.

We need about 1/2 our systems to either run commerical software or talk
to an EMC array. This means we MUST use RH or Suse for those, and we've
settled on RH. Our admins are comfortable RPMing, and all our systems
are registered for RH patching / support.

So no point in introducing yet another distribution into the mix here,
it just requires yet another skill set, or a wizard like Greg. Not
a lot of those around here, at least not when I was interviewing for
the position.