Once upon a time, Linux had terrible support for laptop hardware. Remember ndiswrapper? That thing you used to get Windows wifi drivers working on Linux. Or how about when ATI (AMD) provided only the most buggy drivers. How about printers?
These days Linux has better hardware support (imo) than Windows. Solving it for laptops was about creating the right incentives for hardware manufacturers. It can happen for mobile too.
I wouldn't say Linux has better hardware support than Windows. When your hardware is properly recognized and supported by Linux than yeah, I do feel it operates much better, more stable and have more knobs. However, not all hardware works at all.
For example, as of now, the hardware sensors on my x590 board are not recognized.
LED control is not a thing, even on most old/established boards (you can argue if LEDs are nice or ugly, but if they are there I want to control them).
Even enterpriseish devices, like Lenovo's X1 laptops, that are CERTIFIED by both Red Hat and Ubuntu, have limited hardware support at best. Fingerprint scanners on 3 year old models are still not recognized, and there seems to be zero will from synaptic to ever support it. Sleep states were terrible for a long long time, finally fixed in a fashion that requires different firmware for optimal sleep performance on Windows or another one for Linux.
So no, my experience is that still hardware vendors are not giving me as a Linux user the support and value for the good money I pay for their products. Obviously they don't deliver the expected level of support any reasonable consumer would expect, and most probably won't deliver it in the future either, since they get away with it so easily.
3 year old hardware is still very new by Linux standards. Especially wrt. hardware classes for which a unified support framework has yet to be provided, including RGB LED's and fingerprint scanners. The sleep performance thing is an interesting example, since the whole issue was caused by hardware OEM's deprecating the old ACPI "sleep" state and deciding that OS's should manage standby states entirely on their own - this too will require a lot of really hard work to be supported properly across zillions of devices.
> 3 year old hardware is still very new by Linux standards
I agree, and hence my claim - Linux have excellent support for the hardware it supports, but in general it is not lagging behind Windows in that dimension due to restricted access to required information.
These days Linux has better hardware support (imo) than Windows. Solving it for laptops was about creating the right incentives for hardware manufacturers. It can happen for mobile too.