It's not unfair. There's nothing preventing, say, RedHat, from offering its own hardware for sale.

EDIT: Rather than downvoting, perhaps those who disagree with me could tell me why other companies aren't capable of "making conscious decisions about what goes in their machines"?

Apple is, after all, far from the only Unix vendor to do so. Whether it's HP-UX or Solaris, it's fairly common for Unix vendors to tightly couple their software to supported hardware. What is preventing Red Hat from offering a fully Red Hat compatible laptop that works near-perfectly out of the box?