May be that they didn't do that with their pro offerings, but I for one try to avoid companies with such a mindset.
That said, it's true that it doesn't speak well of the company.
This is, in my opinion, one thing that greatly helps apple build their reputation. When you mention "Dell" people first think of their cheap/bad inspirion stuff and not of the high priced xps, elitebook etc. models. Similarly for HP, similarly for Lenovo.
For the most part it helps to think of the consumer and non-consumer branches as completely different companies that just happen to have the same name.
Case in point: There are many comments in this thread about their their privacy disasters with the consumer line or how they don't like the service levels for the consumer line. On the one hand, this has nothing to do with how it works for thinkpads, on the other hand both are Lenovo.
As a similar example, suppose you have an article about a new Porsche and then 90% of the comments are about how they don't like something in their VW Golf. That would seems weird, right? Yet both are made by the same company.
If I were a consumer buying a Windows laptop for Windows use cases there is no way I would trust any hardware supplier's OEM build out of the box to not include bloatware that adds a level of risk out of the box that isn't worth completely wiping the disk (including restoration partitions). Whether it be for "support" use cases or more nefarious / gray areas it's a hard sell to say any one is exemplary better than the other. Maybe niche players and those that are selling non-Windows variants, but the reality is margins are thin on general purpose computing and so these types of angles become the norm. And the reality is Windows has lost it's way with regard to being consumer oriented. A default consumer build out of the box is already riddled with ad and bloatware. It's truly a cringe-worthy state of consumer options today.
However, if you reinstalled Windows manually you wouldn't have. Technically it had nothing to do with firmware.
Also didn't know about the "Download Valley"
Purism has an open source laptop that looks good. Expensive, though. Voting for FOSS hardware with your wallet ain't cheap.
Lenovo is supporting Linux on a lot of their hardware moving forward [0]. Lenovo also joined LVFS in 2018 to provide native Linux firmware updates [1].
[0] https://www.lenovo.com/linux [1] https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2018/08/lvfs-lenovo-firmware-upd...
So I guess it is going to land in fedora first and then make its way to other distros.
That said, under windows the fingerprint reader is frustratingly bad (lots and lotsof false negatives and slow). How can they be almost perfect on phones but that awful on laptops?
Dell's XPS "Ubuntu edition" looks like a great device. However, limitations on repairability at that price are a non-starter for me.