Remember, it's the first impressions that count. Always. Someone who's hardware is wholly unsupported under the default Ubuntu configuration, crashing the PC or fscking up the display isn't going to try Ubuntu - or any other Linux - again anytime soon.
That's not to say that Ubuntu isn't a great distro. But like the article says, if you're going to market something, make that the best you've got. You don't enter a championship with your mediocre offerings when you've got loads better. Ubuntu can do, and indeed in the past has done, better so why this and why now?
Initial impressions == does it work or not. How badly is it going to mess up my existing configuration. How does the upgrade go. Is my hardware supported.
NOT initial impressions == how many windows you can wobble at once. Having the latest (and buggiest) version of framework X just for bragging rights or the need to get it out regardless of quality. Testing extensively under very limited conditions and barely for any of the slightly-out-of-the-mainstream cases.
EDIT: Wow, seem to have really struck a nerve to have reached -4. Would love to know what the downvotes are for, or if it's just a knee-jerk OSS reaction because I think I explained my POV quite well (whether you agree with it or not).
It's nice if Linux supports as much hardware as possible, but to demand that it supports ALL hardware seems over the top. If you want to run Linux, check for hardware compatibility BEFORE you buy stuff.
I don't think Windows 7 supports ALL hardware? OS X for sure doesn't. If W7 supports all hardware, hats off to MS. Actually I think supporting all the weird hardware out there was a major achievement Microsoft did not get enough credit for (back in the days). Apple never even tackled that monumental problem.
For instance, it's well known that nvidia stuff doesn't work as well as Intel, because Intel is involved with the production of free drivers, whereas Nvidia dumps out a binary driver once in a while.
(I run that one as a community service - if someone wants to help with the design, it would be more than welcome!)
The perfect upgrade is impossible (i.e across all user's machines); my experience has been only Debian and Gentoo come anywhere near close to painless, but to be fair, that's probably mostly because I'm constantly doing micro-upgrades on these dist's (Deb "testing" track) and there are still some app's or packages that haven't been tested into oblivion by the time I get to them, and so require me to troubleshoot and fix on occasion.
If you care about stability more than being near upstream's head, you have to choose an LTS dist, and you have to vett every single upgrade the Vendor/Maintainer wants to apply. If not, accept that there's a percentage risk which you have little control over.