Cool, FreeSBIE has a FreeBSD livecd. I've been hearing for ages how stable and wonderful *BSD is (and I did consider it for the the new UFies.org server, but in the end decided that putting a system on the net that I didn't know about would be a Bad Thing :) but have never really tried it outside of VMWare a couple of times.
Anyway, if you're interested in trying out FreeBSD without worrying about all that scary installing stuff, check out FreeSBIE.
Cool. I bought the book/CDs for FreeBSD a year or two ago. Even installed it once, then realized that once you have X/KDE/wmaker/xmms/Apache/etc installed, it's really the same thing as Linux. From looking at the FreeSBIE screenshot, it's pretty hard to tell the difference from a Linux desktop...
IMHO, the main strength of FreeBSD is the ports system - one central, up-to-date repository for all apps available. With Linux, you must get regular new distributions on a regular basis if you want to upgrade your apps. But beside this, the base is pretty much the same.
It's not necessarily true that you need to reinstall every time you want to upgrade your GNU/Linux apps. There are distros which allow you to make a seamless system upgrade without reinstalling. Among the "old" distros, Debian readily comes to mind. I've never reinstalled Debian since I first installed it in 2001, and I've gone from Gnome 1.4 to Gnome 2.6, Linux 2.4 to 2.6, and XFree86 4.0 to 4.3. If you want a distros that mimicks the ports system, you can try Gentoo.