I personally like how the BSD's are meant to be distributed as an OS, whereas Linux is just the kernel and the distributions of them are focued on programs and the like.
That's my least favourite part about BSD. What's the point ? I find it just creates more confusion. tcpdump, ssh, BIND are all parts of the BSD base system. But they're not real copies of tcpdump, ssh, or BIND. They're actually BSD tcpdump, BSD ssh, and BSD BIND all of which were modified (by Makefiles, probably) to operate on BSD, whereas on Linux you're using the real tcpdump, real ssh, real BIND, etc as distributed by the vendor.
Also, to make matters worse, BSD base systems vary from distribution to distribution. OBSD and NBSD include X in their base system (because of console driver integration), whereas FBSD does _not_. That's just bloody confusing. What's BSD base system now ? KDE ? xterm ? Mozilla ? Any of them ? If one is, is it on both distributions ?? But none of them are base on FBSD...
Compare that with Linux... X, KDE, xterm, Mozilla, none of them are base system/need to be cross-compiled for your system. You could go on any Linux verison and know wether or not xterm is part of your base system (it's obviously not, as there is no Linux 'base system') and compile it right out of the box. That being said, having a 'base system' just doesn't seem to simplify matters at all.