My experience matches yours. Wifi has worked for me for ages now, with various chipsets, but battery life has been very hit-and-miss, GPUs are almost a lost cause, and function keys/backlighting/cameras/other non-essentials are hairy.

That said, the sibling comment has it right. Why am I buying laptops that don't support Linux if I'm going to use Linux on them? From now on, I'll only buy things that have Linux support as a first-class objective.