yes, and blame the consumer
People reward the "winmodem" style hardware manufacturers by buying their stuff due to the lower price.
The real "problem" may be Linux developers themselves have newer, more expensive (read 'standardized') hardware that they develop upon. Most driver problems I encounter are on older low end (cheap) hardware.
If you want most cutting edge Linux distributions to work out of the box, get yourself straight-Intel hardware; intel networking chips, intel graphics, intel chip sets, of course intel CPU... and NOT a celeron or an older single core.
My all-intel i5 system has been ideal for testing Linux distributions. I had a soundblaster card in it at first but encountered conficts. I removed it and use the on board intel sound and no more problems.
