Sic Transit Gloria Laptopi

> and that's made worse by the fact that Linux still can be problematic
> wrt hardware

Without knowing more details, I'd say for the OLPC this can't be an 
actual problem. They are a bit in the same position as Apple here: they 
have a fixed set of hardware, so they can concentrate on getting this 
combination of hardware working properly.
This is very different from a generic Linux distro which has to support 
all combinations of all kinds of hardware properly.

Alex