I don't have room for a desk with a workstation PC to run it and all PC laptops are so lame these days that I'm stuck with Macbook Pro but keep toying with a double boot idea.
Hardware vendors won't sell it preinstalled (Dell's offerings are weak, esp. outside of the US), and not even Lenovo is offering a linux preinstalled option. It seems that Microsoft still has tremendous leverage in the hardware markets.
Providing (official) images that are basically guaranteed to work with a range of popular notebook models would greatly increase people's willingness to switch. I really want to switch to Ubuntu/Linux, but I don't want to spend two days configuring X and getting my webcam to work.
Even resolution is wrong: 15" panel shouldn't be higher than 1440x900: many web sites aren't readable at resolutions higher than that, yet Lenovo offers only 1280 and 1650 horizontal pixels (too few and too many).
In what way does a higher resolution hurt anything?
Guys with 15" 1680x1050 laptops, can you tell me if you're comfortable reading dpreview.com with default font settings?
Every OS that I know of offers scalable fonts
There are more to it than just scalable fonts. Windows is essentially hardwired to 96dpi, only fonts scale, everything else does not: there are virtually no vector graphics involved in traditional Win32 UI API, even icons are fixed bitmaps: 16x16, 32x32, 48x48 or 64x64 pixels. They have some logical units of measurement of dialog boxes, but everything else is measured in pixels, see GDI/GDI+. Switching to 120dpi on windows is downright painful: a lot of applications either start to look ugly and disproportional or sometimes even break down: UI layouts fall apart.
PS. Windows 7 has a proper scalable interface. I don't or use like Windows, but I tried it and it works well. You don't even need to restart the entire OS to change the setting anymore either.
It's sad, but I had to lecture a web designer where I work. It's amazing how he insisted that was the only way and how every monitor in the planet should be set at the same density.
(I'd swear there's a huge bug in the Firefox image scaling algorithm, but since it's persisted this long it must just be me.... resized images are a bit ugly, but as we move into a world of resolution independence, a period of "ugly" is inevitable, unfortunately.)
Beyond that, Karmic is supposed to being a new UI look (brown no longer). Since this is often the most prominent complaint I get about Ubuntu (ridiculous or not), it will be a welcome change. According to Shuttleworth, "The desktop will have a designer's fingerprints all over it." That's really welcome and I hope they do as wonderful a job as they've done with the rest of the system.