Purism CTO here.
I will not comment other but I can say for ours - you get it preinstalled with coreboot (which will also get updates as it progresses), all works out of the box with Free software (we preinstall on it PureOS but you can install any distro out there). Touchpad was an issue in past but we changed now and have quite a good touchpad that just works. The case is anodized aluminum.
All Purism Librems have hardware kill switches - which means you can disable physically mic/camera and wifi/bt. Backlit keyboard is now on all models if that is something you like.
Also with every buy you support our ongoing development such as neutralizing entirely ME, reverse engineering missing bits, creating our own firmware, developing PureOS as well as having better and better product (also if suddenly there would be thousands and thousands of orders, it would put price down).
P.S. because there is no Free software for Bluetooth (for WiFi/BT module) we have it disabled by default which means you would not be hit by latest Bluetooth exploit :D