I was more talking about software (OS-specific and DE configuration, packages, etc.) rather than hardware. I've only first started using Linux about four years ago, and I understand it used to be quite different, but I've honestly never had any significant trouble with regards to hardware working on Linux. With the exception of the time that I put Arch on an extremely new Macbook, everything has always worked pretty well out of the box for me. The only hardware-related thing I've ever had to configure on my non-Apple laptops is adding a kernel parameter in the bootloader config to get the backlight adjustment to work.

On the other hand, I've yet to find a distro that pre-installs a GUI with configuration and packages anywhere close to what I want in a setup. I go out of my way to use distros with an option to install without a desktop environment even if it has an option to install the one I want, since it usually comes with a lot of extra crap I don't want. Obviously I'm probably a little more extreme here than even most Linux users, but at least among Linux power users (i.e. the people I'd expect to be interested in buying a laptop to single-boot Linux) that I know, Unity is considered to be kind of terrible.

Am I wrong in assuming that these types of "developer edition" laptops will generally come with a vanilla Ubuntu install? I admit that I've never really looked into getting one, so it's quite possible I'm mistaken in understanding the kind of setup they provide