Mail servers, firewalls, and a decent development environment are the reasons why I would never dream of putting windows on my servers (personal or work); but they don't really matter that much to a user-end device like a laptop. Especially to a non-programmer/admin.
System 76 is great, but too expensive to be a good recommendation for most friends and family. As far as hardware support: I'm not so troubled when some exotic device doesn't work, but I'm talking about HDMI here, it is THE standard media connector, and the video card does work apart from HDMI.