They don't have the power to block a release if a three year old laptop is broken. Hence, not nearly good enough. If there was a System76 distro and it wasn't terrible in other dimensions then we'd be talking about something interesting.

Well, I agree that they don't have such power right now, but I don't think it's currently biggest bottleneck (linux doesn't break that often, + LTS releases get more and more usable, for example 12.04 is already good).

The bigger thing currently is to simply buy something and know it will 100% work with at least current Ubuntu. That's unfortune, but it's true.