mp3: cowon beats them hands down in battery life and features.
as for the rest, it's spoken like someone who has no clue how long and hard it is to clean room reverse engineer hardware so you 1. don't get dragged into court for breaking laws. 2. can legally distribute the code to anyone.
even when you have the documentation as in the case of ati giving it to the foss world. it takes a long time to build the code base. compare that to the window's driver which is probably choked with legacy code from people who don't even work at $graphics company any more.
as for distro's working together, while you may not see it(go see a eye doctor). it is the same thing as asking 'why can nations get their shit together and tackle X problem?'
it's because each camp has their own philosophic ideals on how things should be and should be run, they view the other's as wrong and they refuse to change.