... the hell ?

Ubuntu was ridiculously slow on my netbook. Even just moving the mouse around was laggy -.-
But Lubuntu runs great and is indeed plug-n-play, and still very configurable once you get used to it. The only problem is that to get Lubuntu, you have to install it. It's not hard but the "average user" they are talking about probably doesn't even know how to click on an icon.

"From a vendor perspective, Linux is very hard to support because there are so many different versions out there: do we have Eudora, do we have SUSE, do we have Turbo Max?"

A lot of software I have found just has a 'linux' version, that should just work regardless of what distibution you have. It doesn't seem harder to me to support linux than it is to support windows or macs.

But yeah, it usually isn't preinstalled, so to install it, you have to know how to create a bootable flash drive, and how to boot to it. While there are plenty of easy to follow tutorials about that, but those who just want it to work would say it's too complicated before even trying to look into it.
Also sometimes linux software hasn't got an installer, but requires you to copy-paste a few lines, which would also be 'too complicated'.

Sounds like they are describing windows.

And ? Linux 2.6 was already pretty good iirc.

Thus doesn't change a thing. Linux was as good as today back then, while windows hasn't changed.

Lol it did become better. What I mean is, it worked as well as it does now.