My first Red Hat install was off Daniel Veillard's hard disk. I got
excellent value out of the code they wrote to allow that (their
installed and the packaging system on which it is based) --- as did
you, even if you got it off CD-ROM. (A bunch of gzipped tar files on
CD-ROM in a box on the brick-and-mortar shelf would have made for a
much more involved installation procedure).
I'm also getting some minor value these days out of the effort that
they've put into GNOME; I say minor because I'm really a command-line
kinda guy anyway, but to other folks, that's actually a pretty big
deal.
rst