I'm a mostly happy user of Suse; the latest 10.3 has a specific function to allow you to add and remove "community" repositories, which include things like ATI's drivers, codecs, etc.

Seems to me this is ideal, provide the tablet with the repos already in, which need a good description of what they contain *and* *why*, and allow the user to easily enable them!

the other problem is, as Gen. Ant. says, poor discilipline amongst packagers - the "official" repos should NOT accept packages/projects unless they meet a certain standard - or at least segregate such ones into a different repos so people can ignore the junk!

--edit--
opensuse also offers a build service, which gives people the chance to request something to be added. I think Angstrom devs will also attempt to take people's private build recipes and fix/improve and add to official distro.

one thing I like about freebsd (being a fan of pfsense) is the coherence of the freebsd "product".