I'm not going to sit here and defend Linux on the usability front (from the perspective of usability to a typical layperson at least).

Laptop support is definitely hit-or-miss, though it's come a long way in the last few years.

But once it works, it generally stays working.

That's not necessarily true. I used Ubuntu for a year or two, and each release seemed to break something different (WiFi or sound usually), and while the fix was usually pretty easy, it still required fixing. I got fed up and switched to Fedora and ran into the same problem with release upgrades (and release upgrades seemed to take longer). After a year or so of that, I switched to Arch and have had fewer problems (the only problems I've had were clearly mentioned in the front page, with a working fix) and have used that for several years (5?).

Maybe that's because I'm better at using Linux now, or maybe that's because I have better hardware now. My point, however, is that Linux has its share of problems, especially if you do release upgrades. There's a reason LTS versions exist, and I haven't had anything break when staying on an LTS branch.

That being said, I've had fewer people since switching to Linux. On Windows, if something breaks, it's a royal pain to find the fix most of the time. Sometimes it's a bad driver, other times software needs to be reinstalled, and still other times a system file got corrupted and I need to figure out how to replace it. I've never had those types of problems on Linux, just configuration issues for hardware that isn't well supported anyway (can be solved by being a little picky about hardware).

The difference is expectations. When I pay for Windows, I expect it to work since the hardware all claims to have Windows support. I don't have the same luxury with Linux, so I expect problems. Maybe Microsoft needs a grade for hardware to determine how well it should work, idk, but having issues with "supported" hardware is really frustrating.

Agree a hundred percent! If I could get sleep/hibernate to work reliably, I would switch over to Lubuntu in an instant.

This is entirely hardware dependent, if you get a Linux-first/well tested laptop, it works. If you get just any random laptop, you'd likely hit some snags.