Acer likes Linux for laptops (c|net)

No offense, but it is you who seems to be trolling. The GP's comment is pretty insightful. 

First of all, what you are describing is incorrect. You cannot install a package  in this way
if it happens to have dependencies which are not in the standard OS repository. Telling your
user to edit /etc/apt/sources.list ... Yeah, good luck with that.

Secondly, have you ever tried to install the same package on Ubuntu *and* Debian ? Or on two
different versions of Ubuntu ? Or on Fedora ? 

And lastly, have you tried to create a binary package for more than one distribution and
version ? Did you test those packages ? On all distributions ?? :-)

There is another aspect to all this which you are also ignoring - users cannot simply go to a
web site (Open Office, or Mozilla, or whatever) and download and install a newer version of
the software. It will conflict with the one in the distributions repository, there will be
problems with upgrades, etc. So, most users are conditioned to ignore newer versions of
software, until their distro packages them. What is worse, their are forced to upgrade their
entire OS, even if they only needed a newer version of one package.

I could go on an on about this for ever. The reality is, for better or worse, it is immensely
easier to distribute software for Windows, despite of "DLL hell".