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What I know is when nvidia came out, I was seeing thousands of posts from people desperately seeking answers on how to get them to work,

The first time I ever used linux semi-seriously was in a computer class in like 2004. During downtime, since the comps had nvidia cards, I wanted to play Unreal Tournament, so i decided to install the drivers. The steps:
1)Go to nVidia.com, and download the driver installer.
2) run .\driverinstaller
3) play unreal tournament.

Ever since then I have periodically gone back to Linux, each time with an nVidia card, and each time the process was the exact same. Download the installer (helpfully linked here!), run the installer, reboot.

Ubuntu (and I imagine other distros) has for the longest time also had the nvidia drivers in its repos, so you can install it from there even easier ("apt-get install nvidia-drivers-binary" or whatever) and not have to worry about kernel upgrades.

Its not that hard, and it basically has never been that hard (at least for the last decade).

What I know is when nvidia came out, I was seeing thousands of posts from people desperately seeking answers on how to get them to work, and thousands more on how to make their X Window survive upgrades

Synaptic is basically a front-end for apt, and I imagine synaptic's other-distro brothers are similar in that regard. If an upgrade like that is breaking things, the package itself might be broken. Regardless, IIRC the driver is a kernel module and shouldnt be broken by just an X upgrade, though kernel upgrades do have the potential to cause issues if you DONT use a package manager.

Well nvidia just released a new beta driver the other day it seems to be stable and I haven't had a TDR since yesterday with it.

Win7/vista 32
Win7/vista 64
XP
XP 64 server and 2003 64 server
  The TDR problem has been on going with the 280 release and all that the 275.33's were the last stable release, it looks like the 290's are finally stable. Only took them 6mo.

Well nvidia just released a new beta driver the other day it seems to be stable and I haven't had a TDR since yesterday with it.

Win7/vista 32
Win7/vista 64
XP
XP 64 server and 2003 64 server
  The TDR problem has been on going with the 280 release and all that the 275.33's were the last stable release, it looks like the 290's are finally stable. Only took them 6mo.

Well nvidia just released a new beta driver the other day it seems to be stable and I haven't had a TDR since yesterday with it.

Win7/vista 32
Win7/vista 64
XP
XP 64 server and 2003 64 server
  The TDR problem has been on going with the 280 release and all that the 275.33's were the last stable release, it looks like the 290's are finally stable. Only took them 6mo.

Well nvidia just released a new beta driver the other day it seems to be stable and I haven't had a TDR since yesterday with it.

Win7/vista 32
Win7/vista 64
XP
XP 64 server and 2003 64 server
  The TDR problem has been on going with the 280 release and all that the 275.33's were the last stable release, it looks like the 290's are finally stable. Only took them 6mo.

CPUs are no longer really interesting for number crunching, having been replaced by GPUs. They are also being overclocked with liquid nitrogen: 3dmark record from November '11. I bet we will see more of this kind of insanity as GPU support for all kinds of number crunching increases.