I know the argument, but with people going with wide-screen laptops and the like, screen real-estate is at a premium, especially at the top of the screen. The menu-bar is small and compact, The ribbon is not. Even if the ribbon goes on the left or the right, it still eats up pixels. I much prefer right clicking for context, but that's just me.

Here's another relatively good explanation of why linux laptops have such poor battery life. The summary is (in order):

• Linux does much more in the way of disk IO than Windows due to how data is written out of the page cache using pdflush
• Those of us who run journaling file systems will have more disk IO than those who don't
• Memory management has generally done little to no prioritization of which pages are written to disk

This is, of course a vast simplification, but it gets the point across. The linked to article also shows how to use laptop mode to address these issues and extend batterly life (although, it seems to me that there is a trade off in the ability of journaled file systems to perform correctly).

Yeah, I have a crazy relative who is just fine around these things until he notices them. He's great around traditional 60 W lightbulbs (powered by AC voltage at 60 Hz), but show him an LED, say the green one that turns on when you turn on certain devices, and he is being poisoned. He often leaves the house to avoid E&M fields, and because it's so cold outside, takes a plugin space heater with him (giant extension cord and all).