No store anywhere near me has a PC with Linux pre-installed. I don't know how I would go about finding one in which I would have any confidence at all. Without a local store, how would I get potential problems sorted? Without a local store, any problems would land me in the same situation I'm in now.

See the dilemma?

For example, I'm on an Ubuntu machine now, and I've recently tried to upgrade it, but apparently it's too far out of date. I've tried to install some software, but it can't find the necessary site that has the package. So now what? I have nowhere to go apart from the internet, and suddenly I am once again having to learn stuff that I really don't want to have to know.

Again, this isn't a complaint, it's an attempt to help define and clarify the problems faced in getting Ubuntu (and other distros) more widely adopted, something I would love to see.

I have a two year old Gazelle Professional from System76. Everything worked out of the box, and in the one case I had an issue (related to reinstalling the OS from a thumb drive), the System76 tech support was absolutely fantastic. Got a direct line to someone who knew all about Linux internals and was able to fix my problem before I could finish articulating it. And for less than the price of a Macbook Pro, I got an i7 processor, two hard drives (Ubuntu preinstalled on a 128GB SSD + a 500GB HD for storage), a beautiful 1080p matte screen, a nice graphics card, and 16GB of RAM. Like I said, this was two years ago and it's still better than most laptops you can get in the price range. The only downside is that the thing is like 6 pounds and sucks up power, but as desktop replacements go I think it would be hard to find better. So the options are there, just not in retail stores yet.

Unfortunately, they seem to have cut the price and removed the discrete graphics card option from the current Gazelle Professional. I guess that makes sense given the state of Linux gaming, but being able to run CUDA on a $1200 laptop was pretty awesome :(

When I bought a System76 computer around the same time-- the low end model for my wife and kids--Ubuntu crashed during setup and never recovered. Fortunately I am savvy enough to be able to do a fresh install. Fortunately, everything did work "out of the box" when I did a fresh install. But average computer user... that just doesn't work.