That's why people attempt abstraction

nvidia benefit hugely from the fact that opengl is already a pretty effective abstraction layer, and the vast majority of their driver is devoted to turning opengl commands into the card's internal format. On the other hand, their lack of integration with the rest of Linux does carry costs. Their driver fails in a variety of situations where nouveau succeeds (handling multi-GPU laptops, systems where the EDID has to be obtained via ACPI, thermal monitoring, backlight control, integration with xrandr) because nouveau is able to take advantage of the infrastructure present in Linux. And nouveau's 2D performance is massively better than the nvidia blob, because nvidia have nothing to abstract 2D operations between Windows and Linux.

So it depends. If you want to do nothing but run 3D applications then their approach is successful, and if you want to do anything else their approach is dreadful.