A lot of what's nice about Macbooks is in the software. The battery life is at least partly due to software, making good/attractive use of the display, handling

A lot of what's nice about Macbooks is in the software. The battery life is at least partly due to software, making good/attractive use of the display, handling sleep states well, multimonitor support, and so on. You'd have to put thousands (tens of thousands?) of (expensive-)person-hours into Linux to close that gap enough to matter.