Since I just had a fairly decent discussion on the subject with someone else, I present my collection of "my packaging system is better than yours" rebuttals. Since I am closest in leanings to a Red Hat zealot, this is mostly presented in the form of responses to common accusations against rpm.


apt is better than rpm
Indeed it is. apt is a package manager. rpm is a packaging format. Perhaps you meant to say apt is better than up2date or deb is better than rpm. Compare like with like if you're going to argue about this sort of thing in the first place.
apt is better than up2date
Firstly, define "better". Secondly, actually, yes, apt is better in several ways than up2date, which is why prior to Fedora Core a lot of people used a variety of alternatives to up2date, including yum, rpmfind, gnorpm, and even apt-rpm. The Fedora Core tool can access yum repositories which eliminates the need for yum, more or less.
apt handles dependencies better than rpm-based tools
I am unclear on whether it handles them any faster, which is the only &quote;better-than" argument on this point I'm not definitively able to refute. All other cases boil down to either "I ran rpm with dependency checking switched off and it broke my system" (well, duh, that's why there's dependency checking) or "I've been pulling in crap from all over the net and I can't sort out dependencies" which is a fair argument but applies no less to deb-based packaging. Note that the third major use of this is actually a recurrence of the first item, viz. that rpm itself will simply report unresolved dependencies and bomb out. It's not rpm's job to resolve the dependencies for you; it just enforces them. Higher level tools are responsible for figuring out if more things need installing or whatever.
There's no quality control over the RPM repositories
Actually, there is. Over the Red Hat one. And the Mandrake and SuSE ones. And the other major Linux vendors. However, if you start adding repositories willy-nilly (see previous item) then you will indeed encounter poorly packaged crap. Much like, say, adding random .deb sources to your prized deb-based installation.