IIRC FreeBSD was making some decent progress on the workstation experience before Apple released OSX. Once that happened, a lot of the people working on that switched over and the efforts kind of died down for a while.
I haven't used FreeBSD on a desktop for years, but I've been told it's getting a lot better recently.
All very true. Part of the reason why the effort flagged was that suddenly there were these high-quality machines with a BSD userland around. Un/fortunately (depending on your perspective), Apple haven't put a tonne of effort into keeping that side of things as up to date as they might, so improving the desktop experience on FreeBSD again.
Up until 7.0 came out, the desktop experience was pretty decent, and things like audio and video (anecdote ahead) worked out of the box better than Linux. After that, things started to slip in comparison.
The work put into PC-BSD has helped with the out-of-the-box experience, assuming your have the right hardware, but it's good to see more effort being put into improving the general driver situation. I certainly wouldn't be at all against ditching Ubuntu and switching back to FreeBSD as my desktop OS.
I haven't used FreeBSD on a desktop for years, but I've been told it's getting a lot better recently.