It's not that nfs is so difficult to set up as there is a great howto in the forums. The problem is that since these settings aren't likely to be changed very often, the user is likely to forget how it's setup by the time they need to change anything. It seems this is an area where samba is getting a lot more attention than nfs. It looks like there are a lot of users using samba instead just because they find it easier to setup

For example:
I set up a home network with 4 computers all running ubuntu using nfs. I found the info I needed online and it wasn't very difficult to setup really. Then months later I needed to make a change to something on the network and I had to go back and figure it all out again in order to make any changes. It's just not changed often enough for me to commit the details of the setup to memory. It would probably have been a lot easier to use samba, but I prefer to use NFS.