Yes, you can easily use LINQ to Objects using alternative code, and it's not tha difficult. I tend to like the semantics of the lambda expressions, and it does wrap several lines of code into one. But a lot of operations you can do with your own code, except some of the bigger operations (union, intersect, etc.) are easier to do with LINQ.
LINQ has other flavors; LINQ to XML makes it really nice to work with XML data. I really like it better than the previous objects available.
LINQ to SQL and ADO.NET Entity Framework (with LINQ to Entities) are an object relational mapper and can map to your database tables, and act like stored procedures and ADO.NET datasets do, so that is a very nice alternative than weak datasets/datatables, and I like it over strongly typed datasets/tables too.
HTH.
