> did his finger to nVidia in any way improve relations between Linux & nVidia

Purely anecdotal evidence, but in my experience the few pieces of hardware that I can generally bet they'll be fine with Linux are those branded Intel or NVidia (one may argue about the "optimus" thing, but if you want CUDA on a Linux laptop, nvidia's drivers do their job fine in the end, and this is what most Linux users will care about I guess)

Dunno the mechanics of it, but some things did work up just right about this :)