Ubuntu will never get traction on desktop until video drivers at least show image on monitors. I've spent 3 days trying to install correct drivers for my graphic card, until I've finally gave up.
I was talking about myself, the poster, and geeks in general rather than "the desktop" market. You'll notice I was using Mac OS X when it wasn't ready for the desktop either (and you could argue it never was if you look at global marketshare numbers). Drivers for hardware was their big issue too, something Linux still beats them for today if you compare the difficulty of building a hackintosh to building a Linux box.
However, if you can't even get an image to show with Ubuntu then you're doing something very wrong. Not taking advantage of all the features of the card without installing proprietary drivers (offered, but not forced on you, with a single click in Ubuntu), yes that's common. Not being able to view anything with a recent Ubuntu on a desktop machine is a very unusual situation.
Ironically, Mac hardware has pretty impressive Linux support. Aside from some (admittedly very frustrating) touchpad issues, I have had great success with sleep, hibernate, wifi (once I replaced that trash nm-applet with wicd), nvidia, etc.
However, if you can't even get an image to show with Ubuntu then you're doing something very wrong. Not taking advantage of all the features of the card without installing proprietary drivers (offered, but not forced on you, with a single click in Ubuntu), yes that's common. Not being able to view anything with a recent Ubuntu on a desktop machine is a very unusual situation.