However this:
> That’s a hefty price to pay to fix what is arguably a defect in the original product
What a blatant lie. How can it be a defect in the original product for an operating system which is brought out months after release of the hardware.
One interesting case many years ago was a particular motherboard that had broken ACPI support only in Linux so suspend wouldn't work. The motherboard would explicitly look for if the computer was running Linux and if it was it would hand it a mangled ACPI table that didn't work. The fix was to actually delete any code specific to Linux and have it give the Linux kernel the same ACPI table it would give to Windows and it suddenly worked perfectly. Obviously that's a problem with the BIOS and even though it said it implemented ACPI it didn't implement it properly. It worked fine for Windows but not Linux. You can certainly get more obscure problems going from one Windows version to another as well.