I had an Inspiron 1420 that I believe packs the same graphics card as the M1330 currently ships with and had a pretty awful experience trying to get Linux (or Windows, for that matter) to drive it well. It was very choppy. I believe it was an 8400M GS.
I have a coworker with the Dell 1420 laptop that's preloaded with Ubuntu, and he hasn't had a lick of trouble. I also installed Xubuntu on my Inspiron 1750 multimedia laptop, and once I hooked it up to my router, the Hardware Drivers utility downloaded scripts and everything basically got installed for me.