I guess the important question is whether or not these things are blocked by default or require user intervention to disable cups? Sure, many of us block all ports by default and either route everything behind a reverse proxy or punch very specific holes in the firewall that we know are there and can monitor, but someone firing up an ubuntu distribution for their first foray into linux is probably not thinking that way.
The people who are crashing their 600HP Linux systems are, unfortunately, not the ones who are reading CVE listings in their spare time. Canonical and other distros are probably going to have to patch that default setting.
There are a lot of comments on here that assume Linux is only for servers. But just recently there was a post on HN indicating Linux will likely hit 5% desktop share for the first time this year. That's a lot of people on Linux - and a far higher percentage of people using Linux on the desktop will not know anything about this. Sane defaults should not be a luxury. Of course people should know to wear their seatbelts, but seatbelt alarms are still a very good thing.
And this is why Microsoft force pushes updates. I think when Linux desktops become really popular there is quite a worry if the users simply do not update them regularly enough. Or if they are not secured in most ways by default.
