You would get the same hardware support from Debian or pretty much any other distro. If they had strict control over the hardware I would say roll their own ker

You would get the same hardware support from Debian or pretty much any other distro. If they had strict control over the hardware I would say roll their own kernel, but they don't, so a distro like Ubuntu makes sense. But I don't think the price of dealing with working with Ubuntu would be worth it over using something like Debian. Also, Google was using an Ubuntu based distro for Chromebooks, but they have since switched to Gentoo due to problems of working with Ubuntu.