The hardware situation has got much better, but there are still some problems. Laptops with both integrated and separate GPUs aren't very well supported (so I hear, I don't have one). There's a relatively new scanner in my office that's not supported by SANE. I wanted an external wifi adapter for a desktop recently, and I'm not sure how many will just work with Linux.
On the software side, Steam got ported recently, but there's plenty of other software that we'd like to see. Flash is no longer released for Linux, although for now at least I can still watch iPlayer with the last version of Flash that was released. Hopefully HTML5 will have killed it before much longer.
Of course we shouldn't pretend that Linux is something that it isn't. If it's not good enough, we aim to improve it. But I honestly think that, if non-technical users got something like Ubuntu 12.04 pre-installed on compatible hardware, it would work perfectly well... except for the expectation, both from users and app developers, that everyone has Windows. Which brings me back to the point about market share.
On the software side, Steam got ported recently, but there's plenty of other software that we'd like to see. Flash is no longer released for Linux, although for now at least I can still watch iPlayer with the last version of Flash that was released. Hopefully HTML5 will have killed it before much longer.
Of course we shouldn't pretend that Linux is something that it isn't. If it's not good enough, we aim to improve it. But I honestly think that, if non-technical users got something like Ubuntu 12.04 pre-installed on compatible hardware, it would work perfectly well... except for the expectation, both from users and app developers, that everyone has Windows. Which brings me back to the point about market share.