Printing? In 2013? This is the least relevant part of hardware support for me since about a decade, on any OS. And that goes for pretty much anyone of my friends too, no one owns printers any more these days.
A decade, more or less, is how long I haven't, personally, needed a printer and hence not owned one. So while I can't counter your claims, I couldn't care less. And all the places I worked @ in the last decade, in VFX, ran their printers on queues on CUPS on Linux servers. They always worked, on the utterly rare occasions that I still needed to kill trees to rely information to some entity stuck in the past. ;)
How about sth. just as preposterous an example: I salvaged a +20 years old 9 needle printer (Star NL-10) from a stash of hard rubbish two months ago. I got it to work w/o problems on Linux (trivia: I used turpentine on the ribbon cassette to get the ink 'flowing' again).
I still can't get the thing to do anything sensible when I attach it to my Retina MacBook Pro running the latest and greatest OS X. :P
Printers are still essential for nearly everyone I know: recipes (for those without an iPad), tickets to concerts/theatres/movies, flight boarding passes (these will fade as smartphones become more applicable), legal documents that require signatures, and photos!
How about sth. just as preposterous an example: I salvaged a +20 years old 9 needle printer (Star NL-10) from a stash of hard rubbish two months ago. I got it to work w/o problems on Linux (trivia: I used turpentine on the ribbon cassette to get the ink 'flowing' again). I still can't get the thing to do anything sensible when I attach it to my Retina MacBook Pro running the latest and greatest OS X. :P