ease fo connectivity
The irony here is that if a future Win# delivered seamless interoperability between all your hardware form factors; it'd still be several seporate distributions. You'd have Win# Mobile, Win# Home, Win# Pro and Win# Mediacentre. Your already up to four somewhat interoperable but seporate distributions.
If interoperability was really the primary concern then you'd be pushing for a *nix based system of some sort. Even when the distirbution vendor changes, the distibution tends to remain highly interoperable; MachineA doesn't care that MachineB is running BSD since they both happily talk SSH. My phone integrates into my network far better with SSH than my Windows boxes do (for lack of SSH and need of SMB/SMB2). Heck, you'd probably have a better chance of finding a distribution that works across all hardware form factors given the wider veriety of processors *nix distributions often support).
Also "Linux" hasn't failed at all. It's a kernel who's project goals are to write an OS kernel; they seem to have been very successful at that. Your grief may be justified when directed at the distribution level and only then at distributions who's goal is to deliver a desktop install; probably only retail distributions too if it's going to be a ***4tat comparison including marketing budgets and such.
Personally, I don't care what OS you use. My grief is with dictating your needs to the rest of us. What are these 'everyday user' needs that are not met by any of the major OS distributions? Ubuntu hasn't dropped the ability to read email, view websites, play music or write documents anymore than Windows+Office has. To be honest, I've yet to find a single OS that can do everything I need; does that mean that Windows is a failure for not supporting all my needs?
Anyway, you'll find what you want to find I guess. If you look at every distribution with the mental aproach of "I wonder how this one fails" then you'll always miss the things it does well.
