I would concur. I certainly hand out a few CDs of every release to interested friends and colleagues. I happened across an anesthesiologist just yesterday playing tunes in the OR with his Hackintosh. Not Ubuntu, but I'm willing to bet he's tried that too. So I think the people who are starting to look seriously into alternative computing is on the rise and in a variety of sectors, not just male college geeks and their friends.
Ubuntu is claiming 12 million users. That's not incredibly big, but it's probably enough to make Google take notice.