I have tested Fedora Core Test 6 in these days and found they finally got printing in gnome allmost right. You can easily control your printer's settings about:
pages per sheet
color or monochrome
quality
plus the other usual stuff.
Also printing from openoffice.org seems much better there, with the same level of functionality you get from other gnome applications.
Firefox still lags support for the new printing framework.
Link for reference:
http://www.redhat.com/magazine/022aug06/features/fc6_print/
As of now in ubuntu you cannot easily control those stuff, you can't print a pdf in multiple pages per sheet and you openoffice offer almost no control over your printer.
I hope that the next Ubuntu release can fix printing in Gnome, perhaps using the solution provided by Fedora. I'd really consider this a urgent issue, even worth a few days delay.
Printing is really important for small/home office users and students and Ubuntu must get it right. I had a lot of problems about printing and so have had my mother and my girlfriend who are really prototypes of a normal user. Printing is for me the most annoying bug Ubuntu has and so far the only thing that makes my girlfriend seldom reboot in windows.
Thanks for your suggestion. As a new Ubuntu release is out and this report is more than six months old I hereby close it. Please check if you can live with the Feisty print features. If you feel there a missing features, feel free to open a new bug/wishlist report with a description of the missing featues.