Canonicals goal is to make money from corporate support, so my guess is that translates into what the priorities for the paid developers are. There isn't as much incentive to make it as slick and 'it just works' as say, OS-X. The same goes for Red Hat and Novell. That changes if the OS is meant to help sell consumer hardware, like Apple and Nokia. So I think that because of the trend of the NIT, MID, EEEPC etc. hardware companies will sponsor development that aims to make Linux more joe-consumer friendly. This thread is kind of deja vu. B.t.w.