I think it's really important for people to strive to use the best tools for the job and glad to hear you are open to promoting alternate tools. A lot of Drupal evangelists will claim Drupal is the silver bullet for just about any task. Indeed it is insanely powerful, but sometimes it's best to take the "path of least resistence" and take the starting point that makes most sense for your project.

It's the same Drupal you get from drupal.org, just with a bunch of modules pre-packaged. It does have some modules that connect to Acquia's paid services, but they are easily disabled if you don't need or want them. This is a really handy starting point for most sites.

Theres so much granule control over every aspect of the CMS (term used loosely) that there is a huge amount of research and module hunting to get it to be a wordpress alternative if that is what you are after. I think Drupal really aught to release a pre-packaged "CMS" package that gave you that functionality, yet have the core if you are after a much more customized environment. It would solve a lot of the misconceptions people have about Drupal.

I really appreciate Drupal's flexibility. It is the best I have seen for a multi-user dynamic site. I am quite happy to point people in another direction though when I feel to use its all powerful and customizable features for a basic blog or peddle a widget would be complete and utter overkill.