My gut reaction is that well-made typefaces for digital use, which are often designed with hinting in mind, would lose their benefits. For most fonts, though, it shouldn't make a difference whether antialiasing or subpixel rendering is done vertically or horizontal, and I know you can manually specify your subpixel information in Linux.

Edit: natesm posted a response to the grandparent of this comment with a screenshot of the subpixel orientation selection in Ubuntu.