Last year I bought a Thinkpad E420s based on the praise I had read from multiple review sites and more importantly, the laptop is listed as Ubuntu certified. The first thing I did when I got it was install Ubuntu, of course. I'm not sure what "certified" means to Canonical but I assumed that every component would work flawlessly, such as the microphone, no sound output artifacts, smooth webcam, power & thermal management (although I understand Linux sucks in this regard), etc.

A few months ago, I bought a Macbook Air and as expected, there was a world of difference in seamless integration between OS and hardware.

If a vendor such as Lenovo built a Linux-based Thinkpad with something approaching the seamless integration and quality of OSX and Macbook hardware, I would gladly pay a premium over an Apple notebook.