Actually the X issues are pretty darn irritating. I had kubuntu running on my laptop, since I wanted to introduce my brother to it. Well, everything said and done, he wanted to connect it to his lcd tv. Now, we had it running before on windows, gave brilliant output. But somehow getting X to do it was a real PITA.
Also, getting lcds to give you refresh rates of over 60 is another issue. To top it off, people in IRC just say to use LCDs at 60hz. Trust me when I say this, there is a difference between 60 and 72/75hz in LCD's. Even tho the LCD refresh rates are different to how CRT refresh rates work.
Even CRT's on X can be an issue. My SyncMaster 793s w/ Geforce FX 5200 for example, gave the default of 60hz. The default settings kubuntu gives is at 60hz. Ofcourse a little tweakingin xorg.conf, I had it running at 85. Also, even tho kubuntu ships with the default nvidia kernel, it still uses the nv driver. Something I fail to understand because if you use the nvidia driver instead, you gain some performance increase, including refresh rates. (Ive seen some difference between nv@85 and nvidia@85). I had to move from nv to nvidia to get beryl working, but as soon as i did, the monitor adjustments and everything felt a bit sweeter. Kinda hard to explain. Considering the major GFX chipsets are either nvidia / ati.
This really should be taken care at the distro level.
I am not totally all anti MS and stuff. Thats not the way I think, but honestly its all about the freedom of choice. People today are looking more towards an iMac than they did some years ago. Why? Well, thanks to vista believe it or not. As the old saying goes, immitation is the best form of flattery, people know that vista is a pure rip off of the mac tiger. However, their main concern for moving out is backward compatibility with their existing OS applications. What they fail to realize isthey can get most of it working today either through the likes of Wine or virtualizing your old existing windows. In which case you are free to migrate while at the same time giving you the option of moving back and forth with a live system. Whats this got to do with pushing linux. EVERYTHING!
Vendors and users alike are sometimes unaware of the power of virtualization and what Wine has to offer. Most office people today mostly use spreadsheets, word documents, and emails. Offices mostly run on intranet solutions. Most other applications they have access to are mostly written in Visual Basic. Of which these applications do seem to run fine on wine. If they do have any other applications, they can always boot into windows and use it as and when they need to, encompassing the security of the host OS onto the guest os within a sandboxed environment. Ofcourse the possibilities of this could be rather endless, as organisations which can look towards thin client computing, mostly dont due to their dependency on windows environment. This factor can eliminate that as well.
If vendors and users are aware that their choice of moving can be complimented instead of complicated by dual boots etc., then they will feel more likely to accept a solution which can favour them, specially where licensing issues can be a concern. VMware does have alot of its application to support this for free so it would be a great way to get your feet wet.
Regards, Satish