Yes, please, please, please leave at least the option for hardware detection.
If people don't like it, surely they can delete the autodetect file and then manually install everything to their heart's content?
Is there some blindinly obvious reason why every linux distro would not have a go at setting things up for you, especially seeing as livecd knoppix seems to do pretty well at it?
And yes! Leave the partition icons on the desktop! Macs and Win both do it that way, so noobs will be used to seeing them there - it is pretty intuitive, again, experienced users can always delete them and then used command scripts to try to find them again.