Free is too expensive (Economist)

the distros selected for the early netbooks were not any of the bigger name, well supported distros. They were ones that virtually nobody had heard of, that had no significant community around them, and then the vendors provided no updates for them on top of that.

That's hardly justification for saying that such installations will require "a divorce from the world of traditional Linux distributions", In fact, it's more a matter of showing that if you do make such a divorce, it's going to take a lot more effort on your part to make things work.