We need something along the lines of a Mac-mini with a remote control and high quality audio/video and HDMI outputs.

But, the reason I don't watch TV...
Commercials, commercials, commercials and the fact that they are twice as loud as the main broadcast, and that there are just too many of them. It made the experience so intolerably awkward and unpleasant.

But, saying that, the Internet won't win over TV until it does a better job of emulating it.

To put it succinctly. The person who sold you the package is the one that's responsible for it working. If they are using third party hardware/drivers/software they take on the responsibility as far as your package goes. So if something goes wrong you talk to them, and they find a solution. Now, that solution might mean kicking the third party vendors until they cough up a solution, it might mean designing a work around, it might mean dropping that third party vendor, or it might mean attaching a notification for their customers. In this case Ubuntu's responsible because they're the ones providing you with the package that makes your laptop work. It's their job to identify poorly written drivers and deal with the vendors. If they can't deal with the vendors then they have to deal with it in another way, even if it's handing you the package with a warning. It's the "too f'n bad" rule.

It should also be pointed out that the laptops aren't intended to teach grade-school children computer science. They're usually there to replace text books, expand on course material, and give children modern tools for completing their homework. This is one of the cases where the laptop is not really a laptop, but an application specific computer. They should be locked down to the extent that there are controls on what software is installed on the machine, and how much flexibility the kids have with the settings. If you want to teach the kids some form of computer science then install some programming tools.

If a kid goes through grade school completing assignments in the various office applications, they'll already be miles ahead of today's average adult.

I've done some fairly complex embedded system block diagrams in Excel. I would use the cell frame feature for the boxes, arrows for the bus lines, and then snap everything to a square grid. The beautiful thing about Excel is that everything expands naturally with the 'add entire row' and 'add entire column' features. Labelling is a simply matter of filling in a spreadsheet cell and justifying the text. Some would force me to make drawings in Visio because they were too weak willed to edit my excel drawings (stuff that would take me 10 seconds) and it felt like a real setback.

Saying that, how anyone could do a 3D drawing in Excel is beyond me. The embedded drawing program is nice if you want to do a quick mechanical mock-up with accurately sized blocks.