Quality and openSUSE.org are right now the two main strengths of SUSE. It is true that SUSE reputation for quality got a little dented with the hurried change of package manager in 10.1, but I suspect Novell might well have learned a lesson there.
I think that a big TI company as Novell should know it before. Before than "10.1" lesson, of course.
I don't personally use YaST much other than for installing the odd package, and the only thing I might be missing is support for JFS at installation time. Why don't you list what you'd like to see in YaST in the future? What functionality you're missing right now etc. I'm sure that would be great, much-needed input for the SUSE guys.
Yes, you've got a reason. Specially the front-end/module for iptables/SuSEfirewall is really poor (IMHO).
Interesting question. Perhaps another question to start with - _is_ Ubuntu more popular than SUSE? What is this based on? In which community/country etc? Personally, I don't experiment much with distros as I have a production system to look after, so I don't know anything about Ubuntu.
Well, the prestigious site www.distrowatch.com says it. Moreover in short time Ubuntu has taken market quota from another distros as Mandriva, Fedora, SUSE. I work with computers and in many environments (specially in education environment) Ubuntu is the first choice in front of mentioned distros; besides the Ubuntu communty is very very large!!!