I just got a Thinkpad x260 and I'm running Ubuntu MATE on it. The wireless card is Intel, so no problems with drivers or anything.
It comes with mini displayport too, but I've had some issue where the laptop will freeze up when the display port is plugged in and the laptop screen is also on. Other than that it has HDMI and about 17 hours of battery life.
I just spent a few hours installing Debian Testing on a 2 year old macbook. If you start with a net install you are mostly on your own, but starting with one of the live cds makes it pretty useable from the start. I think the big difference between the two is installing proprietary drivers. Wireless works out of the box on Ubuntu, but I have to install linux-firmware-nonfree and another broadcom package to get WiFi working on Debian.
I just tell myself that the extra work I put into a Debian install makes me more knowledgable about how the system actually works.