What's wrong with running FreeBSD on laptops? Works for me...
I'll agree that many Linux distros are better for beginners, but I dislike having software which I won't use included in my operating system, and I appreciate the FreeBSD ports system and it's ease of use.
Suspend/resume would be nice, but is not a deal breaker for me, as shutting down and powering on doesn't take so long that it's unreasonable, and with a 12 cell battery my netbook runs all day on a full charge.
As for suspend and resume, it didn't become an issue until recently when my workflow became sit for half-an-hour to an hour, then pick up and move multiple times a day. Rebooting, opening all my programs again, etc. became tedious.