Just as Apple's goal was to be a hardware company, which sold an operating system to help sell hardware, Canonical would do well to sell a, er, canonical hardware configuration for the purpose of selling the OS. One of the debilitating downfalls of OSS OSes is the lack of reliable/assured compatible hardware (video drivers being a notorious examples). Arrange for manufacture of a "reference design" system with a "it just works" Ubuntu distro thereon for those willing to forgo hardware options to assure a functioning, no geeking-tweaking, Linux platform.
Great idea. Hey, this is Y-Combinator - somebody get on it!
I have had two machines from them: a netbook and a laptop. (I build my own desktop machines.) Overall they have been decent purchases, but...
The netbook: wireless driver for the builtin never worked. I had to buy (and carry around) a USB wifi stick.
The laptop: fingerprint scanner has never worked.
There may be workarounds, but the whole point of buying from an ubuntu-specific vendor was that I shouldn't have to mess around with figuring out why my hardware doesn't work.
A site which won't even show home-page pictures until I roll the cursor over them? (An observation meaning little on its own, but much in light of bstpierre's experience.)
Great idea. Hey, this is Y-Combinator - somebody get on it!