Yup. Chickenman's right. No writing to NTFS, only reading...
As for the decent GUI: both Gnome and KDE offer great desktop. Actually Linus Thorvald (the creator of Linux) has proclaimd KDE as his personal favorite. Luckily, Ubuntu also comes as Kubuntu, with KDE as default desktop environment. In the end, it's a question of taste, since they both offer the same functionality more or less.
Download an Ubunut/Kubuntu live-cd to try it out!
http://www.ubuntu.com/download