That's one of the problems you face only because you're installing Linux yourself.
If you were a company that was going to sell a laptop with Linux already, you would not sell it with driver problems; you would either be sure to choose hardware that supported Linux or you would write your own driver. Thus, if Linux laptops were easily available, people would not have this sort of problem.
Except vendors have shipped preinstalled linux with driver issues (a high profile early netbook had broken wifi, for example).
It generally takes a lot more distro coordination to support Linux on particular hardware, but the root issue is that the PC OEMs just don't really care to put the effort in.
Also, welcome to Linux advocacy, if you look around I'm sure you can find these types of "Linux would be more popular if X" arguments going back for years.
Yes, if the OEM decides to supply poor hardware and worse support, the experience is bound to be sub-par. However, this still supports my fundamental thesis: Linux's popularity is wildly decoupled from its innate quality.
If an OEM shipped broken drivers with Windows it would be at least as inconvenient. In fact, on my last laptop, this is exactly what happened: the audio system under Windows did not support one of the headphone jacks (there were two for some odd and unknown reason). From a tinkerer's point of view, Linux even has an advantage here: if there is some way to improve the situation, it's much easier to find under Linux. I have literally spent days searching for 64bit drivers for an external wireless network adapter on Windows; finding the same for Linux was trivial.
And to me, of course, the most important bit is that once I get everything working--it's gotten easier with each new computer :)--Linux provides by far the best experience.
How are the Dells that come with Ubuntu, coincidentally? I haven't seen them in retail anywhere, but I have seen them for sale online. If the support there is good, it could be a nice stepping stone going forward.
It's not how popular the machine is, but how well supported its parts are. If you select carefully, you may well find linux-proof machines in every brand.
