I must say out of all the distros I have played with Ubuntu has the strangest Apache setup I have ever seen. I am assuming this is based of a Debian default configuration but have never really played with Debian.
Having said that OpenSUSE also has a strange way of enabling mod_rewrite.
Ubuntu’s PHP setup was terrible until a couple of releases ago. All module configs were shoved in the php.ini, kind of defeated the purpose of them being modules.
Although I’m not happy with several decisions Ubuntu has made with their server software.
(/rant)