My previously technophobic dad has got himself a new laptop, and wants to put Linux on it.
He was also going to go off and do it himself, until I suggested he let me find out any issues with that first, which is why I'm here.

The laptop is a Toshiba Satellite A 500-17X
The Linux he wants to put on is Linux Mint Gloria
The question I want to get the answers to, is what issues, flaws, caveats etc are there for this laptop?

Because I'm fairly certain it's going to need a 3rd party graphics driver, and possibly the same for wireless, but I'd like to find out for sure *before* running headlong into those problems first hand, in the name of prudence.

And so I can 'happen' to have fixes to hand to prove I'm the technical genius he thinks I am, but that's a personal habit.

Linux Mint has a live DVD. Why don't you boot off of that and see what happens? That would probably tell you exactly what you're up against without having to install.

That kind of depends. Both ATI and Nvidia work reasonably well out of the box. However, if your dad is after some of the serious eye candy, then yeah, you'll probably have to install the proprietary drivers. Given that Mint is based on Ubuntu, I suspect that installing the proprietary drivers is simply a matter of allowing restricted packages to be installed.
Again it depends. If the wireless card is based on Broadcom chipsets, yeah, you'll have to do some installation. However, a number of chipsets will likely work out of the box.

Because the CD-image hasn't finished downloading yet, that's why... I have a slow speed because of a few other downloads, and an intermittant connection because of the weather. It'll be ready by morning, so I'm asking in advance.

As to wireless - the hardware manager in Windows 7 just reports it as a Realtek RTL8191SE Wireless LAN device.
That means very little as to where to look for device drivers, since my experience has either been out of the box, or via ndiswrapper.

Your experience with ndiswrapper may come in handy with this one. There are reports of a linux driver at Realtek's site, but a quick google didn't bring it up. Realtek has usually been pretty good about Linux support so there will likely be one eventually. Check out this thread, it links to a potential linux driver.

For the graphics, if you know what kind of card it is we can probably give you a better idea of how well the Linux drivers work and whether you should plan on installing proprietary ones.

I'm afraid at the moment, I can't be certain. I've never used Windows 7 before, and dad isn't exactly good at using it, so it's troublesome finding out most things at the moment.
I'll have to try the wireless on the liveCD when it finishes downloading, and see if it works, if not then I'll have to go looking at Realtek.
Out of curiosity, if they have a native driver, in what form will it be? Source to be compiled and installed, a package, a kernel module?

If history is any guide it will first be available as source code and then eventually move into the kernel. That said, since Mint can use Ubuntu's repositories, I suspect that a binary package will be available shortly after any source code.