Qualcomm has plenty of competitors. Mediatek, Allwinner, Samsung, Broadcom etc. They all have the exact same issues wrt. driver support: they do the minimum work required to bring up their board with one heavily-patched kernel version, and that's it. Allwinner now has quite decent support from the mainline kernel, but only because of 3rd-party efforts. It's not just Qualcomm: these problems are shared by every embedded SoC to date, with very limited exceptions.