If you cherry pick laptops these days, you can even surpass Mac OS or Windows. My MacBook Air from 2012 has longer battery life and stays cooler using a stock Linux kernel than with it's Mac counterpart.
The trick is that it has very well supported Intel components. As a matter of fact, Linus used this laptop for some time.
I run a MacBook Pro (Retina), and love OS X... but I completely agree. At some points, running Ubuntu/Debian on various machines I've used worked better OOTB with Linux that Windows itself did, with far less "find a random driver binary around the web somewhere, on a companies unmaintained FTP server, that probably no longer works with the latest changes in Windows" faffing around.
I hear this a lot, somewhat-technical people inserting 'macs are for dum people that don't know computers'. Truth is, a lot of mac users do know computers (obviously), and it's not that we can't mess with drivers and tweaking, it's that WE DONT WANT TO.
I moved away from Windows/Linux 6 years ago, not sure how things have changed, but I have no intention on going back to that.
Video drivers are still unacceptably bad on Linux. Docking, sleep etc fail for no reason understandable to even experienced users. I use Linux at work because it's still better than Windows but dream I would have a Mac.
You left in '04, this nonsense ended in '06, '07. Partly because no one is really changing the hardware much, partly because we have first class support from Intel now.