when that day comes, I am sure many would switch to Linux, especially among the developers. In the past few years using Windows, I have stopped thinking about device drivers at all, I just expected them to work. I am looking forward to the day where this comes to desktop Linux.
I feel like your and my experiences are completely reversed. I've been using Linux as my primary desktop OS for 14 years, and in the past 8 years the idea of downloading drivers or hardware not working out of the box has become completely alien to me. The last driver I had to download for Linux was for a Lexmark printer in 2005. Everything since then has just worked. When I get in front of a windows machine, though, I'm always ripping through original packaging looking for network, graphics or peripheral drivers, even in Windows 7. I remember Windows XP SP2 didn't ship with drivers for the Intel Etherexpress line of network cards when it came out after 5 years of the eepro being one of the most popular network cards on the market. Insane. My normal trick became to boot the system onto a linux live cd or USB drive, download the drivers and then boot back to windows to install them.
I run Arch on a GTX 285 and never had graphics driver issues. All I ever had to do was tweak on coolbits in the xorg.conf to enable fan control and overclocking (which you have to do manually on Windows as well). The lack of any support of Nouveau makes me not want to buy an Nvidia product in the future, but Catalyst really is the elephant in the room - if only AMD would ditch it, make radeon work really well and embrace the kernel people to make it as good as the Intel driver, they would be in a really good spot.
But the drivers are there. If you are running any modern distro worth its salt, your graphics will work out of the box with the FOSS driver, and switching to the proprietary one is little more than a package get. Which is even easier than on Windows where you have to manually get the graphics driver if Windows doesn't recognize the card (sometimes it does).
Once Linux has good device drivers, someone will release a highly optimized distribution for gaming. Afterwards, I think Linux will start to become the leading desktop OS.
I have no problems with the Nvidia driver on Arch, and haven't had an issue in over a year. Everything runs rock solid, I've never had the display freeze or crash, and it runs a truckload of games in Wine.
Linux becoming a leading desktop OS is all about defaults. Unless it is sold in Best Buy on laptops as a default option, priced below the Windows variant license costs, it will always be a niche product because it requires users to go absurdly out of their way to find or install it.
The Steambox is much more likely to rectify that. Consumer Linux PCs in the guise of game consoles will get it wide deployment.
Linux does have some competitive advantages that may encourage stores to sell it pre-installed.
First, it is cheaper, so the store can advertise lower prices.
Second, many Linux distros look really nice, so if they have them set up on display their will be people who by it for that reason. Then, the first mover would get a reputation as the place that sells that awesome looking computer (and cheaper than the others).
Third, their is little direct cost to trying. They can install it on a few laptops, then if it doesn't work, re-image windows on them.
Of course, (I suspect) the main reason this has not happened yet is the (legitamite) fear that customers would be the computer and then say 'it doesn't work', when it cannot run software X, or open file Y.
I've been using Mac OS since OS 7.1 when I was ~14.
All through high school and my Bachelor of Software Engineering degree, and now working full time, I'm completely dumbfounded when Windows or Linux users talk about device drivers.
I was talking about not having to worry about device drivers and things "just working", you're talking about being on the latest and greatest version.
Those are two different discussions.
Obviously when Apple controls the hardware and software there are going to be some trade-offs, one of which, as you pointed out, is a lack of frequent updates.
