No, no, no reelingintheyears - Milton Keynes is a fantastic place to live. In fact I was just coming on here to say don't bother with Market Harborough or Kettering or Bedford - MK is much nicer and has tons more to offer than any of them.
It's definitely not nondescript - not least because it is different in layout from pretty much all other towns in the UK. It's actually been designed with people in mind, rather than just growing up haphazardly. Driving around is a pleasure as the main roads are all wide and have loads of trees around. Roundabouts make life very easy. The center has a shopping center, one of the best theatres outside of London, lots of places to eat and drink and a huge park that runs loads of events (or others use it as a place to run events, including the incredibly successful and enjoyable International Festival that runs every other year).
There are old villages and new estates (the grid square I live in incorporates an old village with a Norman church, as do several others), village greens with cricket games being played on them, loads and loads of park lands for walking on, redways to walk and cycle on away from the traffic, lakes and canals for sports and flood management (ie flooding doesn't really happen here to damage houses, there are balancing lakes with parks around to act as flood plains), good sporting facilities, great shops (both things like John Lewis, Debenhams, M&S, HofF, TkMaxx at the centre, to Ikea, and the country's first out of town centre Primark, loads of huge supermarkets, a fab market selling top quality fruit and veg at bargain prices and loads more). There are also great schools, some fantastic bits of history (Bletchley Park, National Museum of Computing and MK Museum are fab). OK so I've probably ranted on a bit much about it - but it's not just me, plenty of others like it too - there was this thread on mn about MK just recently...
I know MH reasonably well as dsis lives very close to it and uses it as one of her main shopping towns and dn goes to nursery there, Kettering not so much other than it's unfortunately the town with the closest hospital to dsis and her family haven't had good experiences with it, Bedford I've been to a few times but not been very impressed. Seems very cramped and pretty unappealing.