I'm looking into building a PC and the best option I found to suit (specially due to low power consumption coupled with good performance and secondly for the savings of a dedicated GPU) is the AMD APU A10-5700.

I've always used NVIDIA and their drivers are very good. From what I read about the Catalyst driver, it:

- takes time to support newer kernels and xorg versions (I would at first use Fedora, which I like a lot, but later-on I could maybe learn some more conservative distro like Slack).
- doesn't support cards after some time (I intend to keep the PC for a while).

So I would like to know from Radeon users (specially long time ones) (1)if those concerns are true, (2)if the catalyst driver otherwise works well (compared with the NVIDIA cards/driver) or (3)if you could say anything about the future like if the support tend to better or if the open-source driver could be, for instance, a valid alternative in the future when Catalyst doesn't support the GPU any more (considering that I think about an eventual upgrade with an extra Radeon GPU in Crossfire).

Thanks for your impressions.
I have no Internet so I may look at the post only once a day.

I've been using ATI Radeon graphics cards for years and this is the first I ever heard of Catalyst drivers. In the old days we used to use module-assistant to build the fglrx driver that we downloaded from the ATI site. For a number of years the radeon drivers that come with current kernels does everything I want and is trouble-free. I see no need to worry about ATI's drivers. My currrent kernel is 3.10-7.dmz.1-liquorix-amd64 (as of today) and my graphics card is VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] RV710 [Radeon HD 4350/4550].
jdk

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You might have difficulty with this type of chip due to the graphics that are on-board. I would stick to the original AMD chips of what you can afford and purchase the graphic card separately, this might be a little bit more expensive at first but in the long run it will be the best move.
Buying the AMD chips and graphic cards separately gives you more of a choice, you can at least buy a cheaper graphic card at first and then get a better card later. With your suggestion you will be locked in, you will not be able to upgrade.

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(1) Yes, AMD is very slow with coming up with support for newer kernels and X versions
(2) AMD's drivers can be buggy, but usually they work, but usually slower as the same version on Windows
(3) In the last few months the free driver has made a very good progression, for most cards now hardware video decoding is available (introduced in kernel 3.10, but needs Mesa 9.2) and dynamic power management (DPM) was added as an experimental feature in the upcoming kernel 3.11. You will need DPM for that kind of chip, otherwise the video-part will run with its very low default clock all the time, giving you really bad performance.
I would recommend not to go for bleeding edge distros like Fedora, if you want to use the Catalyst driver (which is the same driver as the fglrx driver mentioned by jdkaye and gives you all the features of your card), but if you have no problem with the radeon driver there is no problem with bleeding edge (I am running Slackware -current with the kernel from Alex Deucher, one of the radeon driver developers).
If you want to use a second videochip, for Hybrid Crossfire or CrossfireX you will at this point have to use the Catalyst driver, those features are currently not supported by the free driver.

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Thanks all. I guess ultimately I could choose the hardware and then do what it takes to make it work.
That's a point to consider.