The driver situation has massively improved, absolutely. The second time I installed Linux (on a brand new computer) was scariest -- S-ATA was super cool and new and my S-ATA controller wasn't supported, so I had to build a patched kernel on my old machine and boot with it...
But higher-up, I don't think we've progressed significantly past where we were in 2010. Sound still breaks (and ironically enough, it had just started breaking, with Alsa finally getting proper soft mixing and hotplug support via udev), KDE and GTK applications can no longer get uniform themes, display managers still get laughable bugs...
the DE end had crapified (it may by shiny crap, but still crap), and the crap is seeping towards the kernel year by year.
The day Torvalds is no longer present to hold the kernel devs to the rule of not breaking userspace is the day Linux goes down the drain.
Ease of use also depends on the distro you choose. Ubuntu or Mint will probably be the easiest; if you install Arch, you should know what you're in for. (Before you jump on me, I posted this from a system running Arch.)