Apple always had the advantage of controlling both the hardware and the software.
Also, in the Linux space, I had amazing experience with Raspberry Pi OS. Not only that it works well out of the box, but being the OS most people use on that specific hardware makes searching for answers to any issues much easier.
Ideally though it would be as close as possible to an existing distro and only include patches needed for good Framework support.
And this is exactly why anyone who likes that approach can & will buy an Apple laptop. Framework is clearly going for the opposite of that market. Instead of being a (necessarily) worse clone of Apple, I think it makes sense for them to cater to the market they are clearly aimed at, which is not people who are happy with a walled-garden system.
It's a bad idea to force users to use one distro. There are many users who run NixOS, and others prefer Ubuntu, or even Gentoo.
> Apple always had the advantage of controlling both the hardware and the software.
Controlling my own hardware is exactly what I look for when buying a laptop.