"Linux for human beings" sounds like an oxymoron to me, after 5+ years of tinkering with Linux on the desktop.
After years of Ubuntu (and Arch, Debian, Mint etc.) I'm not ashamed to say I'm really happy on OS X. Less customisation and more time to focus on actual work/leisure.
I'm on Ubuntu, I haven't customized anything except the background color of the terminal :) And this from someone who was a developer on Windows for 14+ years.
Ubuntu is really user-friendly... until you are having any kind of non-trivial problem, which can happen to anyone if they are unlucky with their drivers, the sound doesn't work, etc.. Then you are relegated to copying command line gobbledygook from askubuntu into the terminal, being able to understand nothing about what it does. At least with those tedious "click on X, then on Y when that pops up"... you're able to understand the gist of what you're doing.
I'm a programmer so I've become somewhat accustomed to working with the command line. But it's hardly a nice user interface for most people.
I have similar experiences, but on the whole still prefer Ubuntu to any other computing experience I've had before. Keyboard issues have been my most recent timesink. Setting up a udev rule for my keyboard (unicomp with trackball, needs some xinput commands run when it gets plugged in) took a long time. That is one brittle grammar with very unhelpful debugging tools. And they got rid of XKBOPTION altwin_swap_lalt_lwin a couple of years ago, patching that back in was messy and there's a good chance I'm going to forget what I need to do to fix things up next time I have to set up a new system.
Even with all the problems I perennially run into I wouldn't be able to setup my input devices and working environment _just so_ with another operating system, so I'm stuck with this junk!
The trade-off is that usually you will always find a solution in the end. On the other hand, for a long time the standard advice for dealing with an opaque technical issue under Windows has been "reformat and reinstall".
I would estimate (from a relatively well-informed position) that about half the serious issues that users face are due to hardware interactions. You'll remember that a few years ago the famous example was WIFI chip-sets.
The reality for the distributions is that if there is good support from the component manufacturer and the OEM then you can provide a good user-experience. We put massive effort into enablement with manufacturers such as Dell, HP and Lenovo [1].
As a user the best thing you can do is to buy hardware with components that will work. In the old days that used to mean looking at hardware component and comparing them to whether they worked with Linux. Now we have certification sites.
The second sort of problem is the general end-user issues. I actually think that Ubuntu is beyond the point where you need to open the command line for normal end-user activities. The big weakness there is that there's no equivalent of the 'Genius Bar' for Linux users.
I guess I was lucky in that installing Ubuntu on my Acer mostly just worked. I had some problems, which were not easy to figure out as a Linux rookie, but some help from forums and installation of some proprietary drivers were enough to give as good of an experience for casual use as I was having on Windows.
Since I installed Ubuntu initially out of necessity, I never really had the time to consider whether my hardware would be supported or not.
After years of Ubuntu (and Arch, Debian, Mint etc.) I'm not ashamed to say I'm really happy on OS X. Less customisation and more time to focus on actual work/leisure.