Well yeah. Just imagine linux being just the command line, then you gotta build a whole graphics layer on top of it. Windows and Mac built them as one combined unit. Linux being Linux, obviously different people have made their own versions for people to download for free. So everything visually above is mostly down to the choice of DE, while the technical command line stuff underneath like the drivers and stuff are the distro. As for interplay, people usually just refer to each distro by their main stylistic inspiration. E.g. KDE is more windows inspired with the start button at the bottom, while GNOME is more mac-ish looking.