I find fixies to be a lot less effort than freewheels, actually. When you're trying to present these kind of arguments, you really need to have had ridden a fixed gear, by the way. No amount of internet bickering is going to change real life hands on experience.
Anyways with fixed gears it's a lot easier to go up hills than with single speeds because you have the momentum of the spinning wheel carrying your every pedal stroke, whereas with freewheels this is not the case. Another advantage is being more in tuned to your back wheel, which provides a good basis for "traction" / feel.
If you consider "fun" a bull**** reason for riding fixed, though, I guess you live in a depressing world. I've been riding my geared bike and really disliking every minute of it since I took apart my road conversion to paint / wait for paint to dry and recoat. Than again the two bikes have a lot different geometry and the geared one is much heavier, so that could account for my disdain in riding it too: I don't like shallow, unresponsive geometry and heavy frames...