1. No single distro can be called the best, Knoppix live is a good CD to start with, as you don't even need to install it to try it out. Fedora Core 3 is a good installable distro. Vector Linux is my favourite easy to use distro, its quite sleek and fast, and has good configuration wizards.
2. Drivers for generic devices (CD drives, video cards, sound cards etc) should be supplied by the distro as kernel modules, and most distros will configure them automatically. Special devices like 3d chipsets, winmodems may require drivers that have to be downloaded from the manufacturers site.
3. I don't fully understand, however digit provides those distros which are the latest at the time the magazine is released.
4. Most distro's will automatically pick up the kernel module used by your network card, else even a generic device driver will do.
5. Yes
6. See there is no standard linux graphical interface, different distro's will look different out of the box, and you can completely customise the appearance by themes or by using a different window manager all together.
Most distro's come with two Desktop Enviroments - KDE & Gnome. These differ in appearance, KDE is a little like windows, Gnome is a bit different. You can also use something like Fluxbox to make everything radically different.
And as for a good linux documentation site -
www.tldp.org