OEMs should just throw their weight behind one of the commercial Linuxes and be done with the madness. They want to compete with Apple and OSX, that's their chance.
HP, Lenovo and Dell still rule the enterprise, but Apple does very well with consumers. And more and more enterprises are moving to cloud based solutions, buying tablets and negating the 'need' for PCs, even if for the time being they're still buying cheap PCs.
Can you clarify why big brands should switch to Linux for their consumer PCs considering that few consumers wants it?
But real productivity is so much worse in line of business applications on a tablet vs. desktop. Screen size/space is king, and nobody is going to work on a 20" tablet... or give up half the screen to a keyboard. Let alone how tired will your arms be by the end of a day without a mouse for anything.
I know you can tap a keyboard/mouse to a tablet, but at that point, you've spent more money than a low end laptop or desktop, with worse productivity and output.
Here in Europe, Apple computers tend to be above many salaries, forcing people that really want to have them to use leasing.
So healthy European countries do have quite a few. Not so healthy countries white brand PCs rule.