I personally hate touchwiz ALMOST as much as I hate blur, which is really saying something. I have only found sense to be a tolerable oem android skin so far among the big 3, although acer's liquid skin is freakin sick to play with at first, but I could see getting very old, very fast (think the card system from webos inserted into android).
That being said, I think is Samsung was trying to court customers on other carriers that want iphones but didnt want att then it was a good move. I had a friend who I ultimately steered to an inc (this was when the sf had just launced and I was still on my anti-samsung soapbox) who said I like the fascinate because its the closest thing to an iphone on verizon, it looks and feels like one! I have a co-work on tmobile who loves their vibrant for the same reason.
As ugly as the captivate is, it was smart of att to make it look different from the iphone as it was unlikely to snare prospective iphone users there at the time, and kudos to sprint for giving 4g customers a keyboard option instead of the evo (although it further cutdown on internal memory)
But the great the about lp as you pointed out, and adw is that you can rid yourself of oem skins and make the phone yours again.