Hardware support specifically is often cited as one of the ways that "desktop linux" would benefit from joe-sixpack users. That is what has always been lacking from "desktop linux".

Hardware support in official ROMs from phone manufactures is good of course, but what is freely available to the Android community is much worse. It turns out joe-sixpack doesn't really give any shits about hardware support being open-sourced.

It's nice that Google has given back some stuff, but that's peanuts compared with what the "year of the linux desktop" meme promises.