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I have a MSI GT60. Worked flawlessly out of the box with every flavor of Linux except for Ubuntu. Surprisingly, Mint and LMDE run perfectly. Dual gfx Intel/nVidia work perfect with the open source drivers or the nVidia drivers. I suggest you visit Linlap for more info and have a look around. Here is the GT60.
http://www.linlap.com/msi_gt60...

Get a Thinkpad. I just got a W530 with a 1920x1080 screen, one of the few you can find outside Apple. It has great Linux support, even down to the silly fingerprint reader. I can easily get 7 hours or so on the battery with the recommended tweaks. There's a whole wiki just for Thinkpad stuff.

It ships with Windows 7, but you never have to boot into Windows. You can blow away the whole drive, "recovery" and "boot" partitions, and never look back. It has a conventional BIOS in addition to UEFI (disabled by default; leave it that way), so you shouldn't have any issues there.

It's a tank, it's not terribly sexy like an ultrabook, but it's great if you want a desktop-fast Linux-friendly workstation laptop.

Toshiba laptop for Wintereenmas, Win7 on it.

Open box, say "oh wow"
Get out CD with Arch Linux on
Power up laptop long enough to open DVD tray, turn off quickly
Power on with Arch disc in, remove three partitions of crap
Install* Arch, and E17 (yeah yeah, OK, 16.99999 or whatever ...), get the thing up and running, love every minute of it.

CBA sending the sticker underneath back to Redmond for a few quid back, used it to install Win7 DVD (from Piratebay) in a VM that never will be let on the internet because Photoshop is essential for me and WINE just doesn't cope well with it in my personal experience.

* New hardware required WiFi driver to be downloaded from the manufacturer's website. Fortunately I'm a geek and this presented no significant difficulty.

There's a wiki out there that I contributed to some time ago - and coincidentally I got a notice that someone posted the solution in some detail to that page just today:

http://www.linlap.com/wiki/asus+eee+pc+1005pe#comment_daacb79590433e3b0a2ffdf557f1c2ea

When I solved it, you couldn't unlink the two channels in the default GUI, so I had to download a more detailed control package (forget what it is) and solve it that way. That was in Mint 8, though, and Mint 9 probably has the more detailed controls as default (I think I had to get the detailed controls from a backport, so they may be default now).

The Linux Laptop Wiki is a great resource, regardless. It was where I found the brightness annoyances (and the easy workaround), so I figured I'd contribute my "boot to USB" tips there.

That said: At least "Linux doesn't work well with Laptop X" would
at least be ultimately useful to someone somewhere rather than
just being fodder for flame fests.

I think the Linux Laptop Guide might be what you're looking for

Furthermore, I can't figure out where to report this. What's the point of having a beta or an RC if it's difficult for users to give feedback?

I believe there's a bug report process through Ubuntu Brainstorm now; in any case you can just report it in the wrong place and someone will probably move it to the right one, if enough people do that they'll make it easier to find the right place. Heh heh. I'm going to hell.

Try looking around the HP stuff on the Linux Laptop Wiki, and see which other models there are sufficiently to your machine. Odds are they have the same or a derivative motherboard and similar BIOS, and their fixes might work for you.

In particular, I had to disable "Fan always on when running on AC power" on my machine. Some SATA users might have to do their first boot with the SATA adapter set to compatibility/ATAPI/whateverthefuckitsaysintheBIOS mode.

Ubuntu did a shit job of implementing audio configurations. This boggles the mind because even while they were implementing it you could simply read PerfectSetup to learn everything you need to know. I did this on both Gutsy and Hardy with 100% success (not an exaggeration.) I am now running Intrepid on HP Elitebook 8730w and pulseaudio is part of the solution. I haven't gone through PerfectSetup yet, but that's coming. Save your hatred of pulseaudio, it's misplaced. It is the job of the distribution to properly configure the software for the user.

According to The Linux Laptop Wiki, you probably need to pass "noapic acpi=noirq" to your kernel to fix the both the SATA and and the 8139 problems (educated guess on the SATA). (FWIW, I have had 3 different machines with RTL 8139 chipsets and have had no problems whatsoever, so this problem is likely specific to the Toshiba.) You also should try Tux On Ice, which will at least give you a working suspend feature.

That's a hard one. Did you look on the Linux Laptop Wiki? Apparently the Elitebook 8730W does work with Intrepid Ibex (8.10), but getting it running is decidedly not straightfoward. The Elitebook has some fairly exotic hardware, especially the graphics adapter (either an nVidia Quadro FX 2700/3700M or an ATI Mobility FireGL V5725). Despite being nVidia and ATI cards, these are not gamers toy cards, these for serious 3D workstation-level graphics.

Anyway there are step-by-step instructions for installing 8.10 on your Elitebook if you follow my link.