Desktop Netflix is built with microsoft silverlight for which there is no official linux distribution. It can be made to work with a WINE hack, but even something like that may be too much for the acerage users.
But it's not just shiny newish hardware: my motherboard uses some audio chipset that was immediately recognized and used by Ubuntu, but it has various wacky issues: plug in headphones on the front panel and there's audio (after 10-15 seconds) through them, but when you unplug them, it doesn't switch back to the speakers plugged in the back. I can eventually unmute my speakers by playing around in alsamixer, but I'm not sure how, even though I've done it two or three times.
Also, Skype doesn't play well with pulseaudio (again, long-time known issue), so to ensure Skype working, you have to stop pulseaudio and start Skype, but then nothing else that uses audio works until you start pulseaudio again.
Lots of issues, still.
There are some hacks to make it work, but Netflix won't support you if you go that route. Basically, you need a specially patched version of Wine which runs Firefox for Windows with the Silverlight plugin. There are PPAs and the like for Ubuntu users, but it's still a bit ugly and hackish.
Netflix works just fine on Linux, right? Or am I mistaken?
> Or play games.
Most people actually do NOT play the big Windows games you are referring to. They play browser-based games. Work just fine.
> Or have any unsupported peripherals.
Linux' hardware support is actually far superior to that of Windows. Trotting out the 'unsupported hardware'-argument made sense ten years ago. It does not make sense today.
On top of that, it's a bit of a silly point to make. If they don't have a monitor, they can't use it either.
> Or want to use any commercial consumer software.
Your only valid point.