Please notice original parent commenter @brandonmenc didn't provide any reasoning either. (S)he just proclaimed "OSX can wipe the floor with Linux" and left it at that as a declaration.
> little inconveniences of Linux on a laptop just weren't worth the trouble
Specifically: sleep/restore, display brightness control, sound, battery life, wifi, fonts, endless desktop tweaking. ymmv, but this stuff has just never been optimal out of the box.
When I say "wipe the floor," I mean in regards to time wasted (measurable) and appearance (subjective).
I am not an Apple fan and when I say it I say it in its strongest sense. But I love my Macboook Air (and find almost anything else sold by them priced ridiculously high). I have been using OSX for last 3.5 years and I moved to OSX from Windows and Ubuntu and it was good till they one decides "let's blur OSX and iOS" and trust me it's been a clear and sharp downhill slope from then.
As per the list you have made, I didn't find any difficulty with anything but fonts and that was ten years ago. Some of my friends still use Ubuntu and when I say this I am not saying with any malaise or Apple-hate (which I honestly do not posses) but I must confess, today's Ubuntu's font rendering is a lot better than OSX's.
Not to mention it just works out of the box now, everything! And if you are the tweaker type, no doubt you have got the endless possibilities. But as you mentioned and rightly so, ymmv.
I definitely like Ubuntu's font rendering engine better than either Windows or OSX's. The one used by other Distros though (FreeType) is like a way inferior version of MS ClearType.
One thing that definitely kills the Linux experience for most people is that they buy a new laptop model and then complain about Linux not supporting their hardware. In fact, the latest Linux kernel image will generally be pretty awesome about hardware support, but most Linux distros ship with an older kernel version.
Edit: wholly agree with OSX not wiping the floor with Linux