What do you mean by "doesn't work well on a lot of laptop hardware"?

I'm using Lenovo Yoga 510, not Ubuntu-certified, two-in-one device with a touchscreen and a dedicated graphics card. Sure, there's no such thing as a tablet mode in any of the Linux distributions at the moment, but it works. WiFi works. Touchscreen works. Open source graphics driver works. Battery usage has no noticeable difference compared to Windows.

In my three or four years of running Ubuntu-based distributions, I'm yet to find a single laptop where WiFi / sound card / touch screen or any other piece of laptop hardware that doesn't work.

Does anyone have experience with Linux certified laptops?

I was looking at a Linux-friendly ultrabook at the Microsoft store, and the win 10 trackpad drivers did not support scrolling on the display model. facepalm

I guess my question is whether windows laptops are actually less troublesome than preloaded/known-good linux laptops, in practice.

But it also works perfectly on a lot of laptop hardware.

I'm only using linux, and any company-provided laptop I've been using after 2010, at least a different one every year, was working without any driver issue. This included various models of HP, Dell and Lenovo. I'm currently on a brand new Lenovo Yoga X1, again with absolutely no issue whatsoever.

This is false. The opposite is true - Linux runs on many, many laptops without any problems.