Actually, I'd rather like purchasing the notebook with an empty disk, then have the supplier maintain a page in the Arch wiki on what drivers I need etc. (These pages already exist for some models, but only as a community effort.)

When you say "just hard drives partitioned sensibly and graphics drivers installed, maybe X installed", I hear "probably wrong bootloader, probably wrong partition layout, probably wrong FS choice" and so on and so on ("wrong" in this particular case meaning "not what I prefer").

After all, Arch is a distribution for tinkerers who want their system their way.

You make a very nice point. Even an AUR package that just installs the drivers would be great!

Yes this would be an amazing offering that I don't think I could resist.