If you are happy with mandrake and it works for you, you should stick with it.
Folk just weaning off windows find RH distros comfortable.
Experienced folk find it tends to be a tad fat and slow by default, and they have to do a lot of subtle tweaking. Then there are always folk who have a total ashole of a time on their first attempt and just hate the thing ever since.
A complete newbie can usually get a default installation of fedora going smoothly in a few hours. Problems usually arise from weird hardware configs, non-standard installs (bootloader on a removeable drive for eg.), or the plain old user "ass/u/me". (oh - and toshiba laptops for some reason)
Anaconda will detect your hardware 99.99% of the time and there is minimal post-install config required. HW support is the best I've seen. I've been answering questions about soundcards and so on which were automatically detected and configured in FC2.
There is an issue about licences and proprietary codecs. RH has responded to these by dropping them from the distro. So - after the yum update, many people will go and install mp3 support into xmms and install mplayer themselves.
You'll find the unnofficial faqs for FC3 illuminating. There should be one allong for FC4 soon.
www.fedorafaq.org