> It would be something else if they could actually buy an Ubuntu-branded laptop.
That's not a bad idea. Canonical could buy out a small OEM like System76 and advertise. This would be borrowing a lot of the Apple strategy. The difficult part would be the phone/tablet side. There arent any small OEMs to buy out, the best you could do is rebrand a Nexus phone but you wouldnt be able to get a profit reselling them. That might be the only way that Ubuntu on Android is successful though