that Linus Torvalds isn't among the group moaning about proprietary drivers.

This issue came up in the furor before the release of the GNU-GPL V3.
Linus explicitly stated that as long as they are making drivers for linux he will use then, if there is no open source driver available. The kernel itself will never adopt V3 of the GNU-GPL, in part because it would prohibit including proprietary drivers.

I tend to agree with Linus, if there isn't an open source driver, then I'll use a proprietary driver. Fortunately, none of my systems requires a proprietary driver.
[ NVidia's open source driver works just about as well as their proprietary one, only a few features not implemented in the kernel nv module. which doesn't bother me, since I don't really need the features it does implement. ]