I ran Ubuntu 9.04 and 10.04 successfully on a MacbookPro 5,4 with very few hiccups for ~2 years. There's a bit of community support around Ubuntu for getting it running on Mac hardware, but your results may vary. rEFIt and friends are a bit difficult to get working initially, but it's not impossible.

I had the same feeling as the author: displays are a pain in Linux. The sound, wireless and touchpad support weren't as seamless as they are in OSX either.

Even now I've just switched back to OSX because my Ubuntu partition stopped booting, and I do most of my work over ssh on an Ubuntu VM with gnu screen / bash / vim.

The thing I miss most from running Linux desktop is the highlight to copy, middle-click to paste clipboard.