Well, it actually depends on how advanced the target user is. However, the most important distro's are aiming to a global solution to target Linux newbs and advanced users into a same distribution.
Anyway, if you don't want surprises, keep your hands off Gentoo and Debian alike distro's since they don't include an assisted "press-next-to-continue" installation and will cause you headache if you try to install them without knowing a thing about linux. On the other hand there's SuSE which the YaST and others like Fedora and Mandrake which have nice installers (with fancy designs) and some like K/Ubuntu which have a installers with DOS-alike dialogs. Anyway, be pleased to see anything that looks like an installer in a distribution