You can set your update manager to only fetch security updates and install them in the background (and via a GUI, too!). They don't break anything and you won't get bugged.
Plus, many people have huge hard drives and making backups of the OS isn't hard. You can fix it of course, but why bother when can you do it faster restoring from a backup..
Having said this, Windows Update does find a new bloody error code every single time I run it and it never has a clue what the error code means.
So, perhaps, something better than that.
On the plus side, XP SP3 removes the option to have the IE address bar in the taskbar "for legal reasons" and the whole point of free software is to get away from that kind of junk. So maybe it's not all bad the apt-get your-hands-off-my-config-files way.
It rates packages by criticality during updates and hides the riskier ones by default. This is more important for Mint than Ubuntu proper, though, since Mint is a remix on top of the original packages and is more likely to break during a regular package update.
apt-get and yum are a bit too "no, it's your decision, do you want to update libobscure-2.4.6.so and risk breaking everything?"