I don't think it's unusual that a hardware vendor would want to provide an OS that is absolutely guaranteed to work on the hardware they're selling--that's just

I don't think it's unusual that a hardware vendor would want to provide an OS that is absolutely guaranteed to work on the hardware they're selling--that's just protecting your customers. Ideally it shouldn't even be necessary if all of your components have well-supported drivers, but this is Linux we're talking about--only three years ago I had to replace the default wireless card in my Dell XPS 13 because the broadcom one was flaky as hell in Linux. As good FOSS citizens, they would be encouraged to try to upstream all of their tweaks to GNOME or Ubuntu instead, but that's no guarantee that the changes would actually be accepted. Isn't that how Unity started in the first place?