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This was a relatively short but interesting article. Personally I think that laptops are a huge growth opportunity for Linux -- if (or when) laptops can achieve the same sort of price reductions that desktop PC's have done (ie, going from $2000 for a typical system to about $500 for a typical system), then I'd say that the days of the desktop are numbered. Consider telephones. It used to be that a phone was attached to the wall, and the cord limited how much you could move. Then came cordless phones, which allowed greater movement, and now there's cellular which can go most anywhere.
I'd say most laptops today are at the "cordless" stage, where you can take the machine with you and use it in limited areas (ie, an ethernet connection is available). With Centrino, etc, a truly wireless laptop would be the equivalent of a cellular phone, and given a choice between buying a stationary PC or a portable one, who would choose stationary? Today though, getting wireless to work under Linux can be a fairly painful exercise. If that changed, and wireless under Linux were cake, it would be a *huge* bonus for Linux IMO. (Truth in advertising: I could not manage to get wireless to work under Slack, but I did manage to get it working under Suse. For the curious, I've got an IBM T40 w/ Centrino, which is now running Suse v9.1 Pro)
Seriously, if any Linux distros are looking to grab market share, I'd say there is no better place than to focus on making wireless configuration as easy as possible. Ideally it would be automatic, similar to how a USB pen-drive can be autodetected. That would rock so seriously that it alone would be sufficient to convert people to Linux instantly. That's just my 2 cents, but thanks for posting the article. -- J.W.
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