If you take all the laptops with those annoyances from being possible candidates for a new laptop; What is a good non-apple laptop? I always was anti-Apple, still do, but I just can't fault the Macbook Air 2012, which for the time had reasonable resolution/memory/cpu for the price. But more importantly, it had none of the annoyances.
I'm going replace my current Dell Latitude 14 inch laptop and yes it's a hard to find something decent on the market to run Linux even if price is not the issue. So far my top candidate is Acer TravelMate P648, I mentioned it here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12290096 I first need to find a chance to try it in action.