With windows, its likely the base OS may not even be able to install on a piece of hardware without a driver update CD, but the driver support is fantastic. Its possible to run XP on a lot of modern hardware because companies like nvidia continue to make drivers for XP. That is not possible with any linux distribution from that time frame.

The opposite also exists, I have a baytrail tablet I picked up over Christmas. It runs win8.1 just fine, and will sort of boot the latest bleeding edge ubuntu, but the wifi still doesn't work (as of a couple weeks ago), nor does the SD controller, and a few other things are suboptimal.

There are also whole product lines that still don't work in linux (see the USB3 displaylink based products) even years after their initial release.

Plus, linux tends to put users in a sticky situation. For example at work I have a fairly recent intel based platform, that doesn't work 100% in the older (still supported) SLES environment we use by default. That is because the drivers need to be backported by SUSE and they aren't exactly on the ball about it (same thing for the LTS releases of ubuntu).

I'm a pretty strong believer that linux needs to decouple the drivers from the core kernel. I don't necessarily want to upgrade my whole OS platform just because I got a new piece of hardware. This is especially true on stable platforms. Thankfully companies like emulex do a good job of providing two dozen different drivers for different versions of linux. They and a few other companies are the exception not the rule.