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Tell me, why would I ever want to use one of those BSDs over Linux of some sort? What's the allure?
I was initially attracted to FreeBSD because I had first learned Unix on a BSD system in the late 80s, and the more restrictive licensing terms of Linux made it difficult for my company to use it.
So unless you have a specific need like ZFS or liberal licensing terms, I can't think of a reason for a long-time user of Linux to switch to FreeBSD. Similarly, unless you have a specific need like Amazon EC2, I can't think of a compelling reason for a long-time FreeBSD user to switch to Linux. Both are good, solid systems with some minor individual strengths and weaknesses.
The user-land and kernel ship together as a more tightly integrated package.
In terms of performance, I found that the linux kernel is often optimised for bandwidth at the expense of latency.
eg#1, When the system is under heavy memory pressure, Linux tends to grind to a halt and start killing processes randomly, where FreeBSD responds more gracefully.
eg #2, In highly-threaded environments (eg, 32 or more cores), Linux doesn't really work very well unless you pin processes to specific CPU cores. In fairness, BSD doesn't perform much better, but at least avoids pathological cases.
I'm kidding.
The cathedral nature of BSD likely gives it a security edge.
If more virtualized hosting providers offered BSDs (FreeBSD in particular) I would choose them over Ubuntu for servers.