Those efforts should be put on open source friendly cards.

I think statements like "crash happy" and "expensive" and "fast" are pretty subjective without supporting evidence. The evidence I've seen is that NVidia's cards are slightly cheaper on the bang-for-the-buck scale, and the NVidia proprietary driver has been a lot more stable than the ATI cards until relatively recently.

I see it as basically a problem of inertia. NVidia's managers probably see themselves as doing their bit for open source, but they grew up in the 3Dfx/Matrox/Trident world where everything was fiercely competitive - to open source their drivers is probably seen as giving their competitors an advantage. So they do their part by at least giving us something, but still want to keep their secrets.

This 'competitive advantage' is really a fiction, as the architectures of the chips even in the NVidia range are different enough to require separate handling per chip - the difference between the processing architectures of ATI and NVidia and Intel graphics chips must be a gigantic chasm compared with the gap between individual chips. It's also pretty much irrelevant given all the standard arguments for open sourcing - lower development costs, faster bug spotting and fixing, better standards compliance and better community involvement to name the prominent ones.

I think we'll see a change at NVidia eventually. What it'll take is for someone internally to drive the process - compare Dirk Hohndel at Intel and Harald Welte now at Via.