This is a great idea! I think it would be a waste of time for FreeBSD to take the entire desktop market on -- Linux has been fighting that battle for years -- but it would be awesome if Dell/HP/Lenovo came out with a PC-BSD-based laptop with official support. (For those not familiar with FreeBSD, PC-BSD is the "Desktop" edition of FreeBSD.)
Another feature I'd really like to see the FreeBSD Foundation focus on this year is full support for Xen/KVM, with the specific goal of getting FreeBSD to be a "first-class" citizen on EC2. Interestingly, some folks from Microsoft are working on Hyper-V drivers so perhaps we'll see FreeBSD on Azure in the future.
Dell/HP/Lenovo won't do that - the most they're likely to do is half-assed support for Linux. That's why it would be neat if FreeBSD to get themselves working solidly on a single platform, because fans would have a reliable option.
On that note, what are the best laptops/netbooks out there for *BSD in terms of hardware support? I was thinking of doing what the grandparent comment was suggesting, but had trouble finding a list of (near) 100% supported machines.
When I looked at this six months ago the answer was thinkpads. But there is still oddness. I got a X1 Carbon which is a fantastic system once you get rid of the awful Windows setup it ships with but I ran out of time to mess around getting FreeBSD right and moved to ubuntu which is adequate.
Another feature I'd really like to see the FreeBSD Foundation focus on this year is full support for Xen/KVM, with the specific goal of getting FreeBSD to be a "first-class" citizen on EC2. Interestingly, some folks from Microsoft are working on Hyper-V drivers so perhaps we'll see FreeBSD on Azure in the future.