Exactly! I made the same calculation 8 years ago, though now the cost Apple hardware has me reconsidering a PC with Linux for my next personal laptop.
Don't be fooled. By minor he means "Yes, the kernel panics on boot, but the kernel did load."
It boots completely fine to a blank, black screen with no errors at all.
Completely minor. Just need to set a few kernel options to make it work properly.
There are ways to get it to work, of course, but for any distro I've used, before you've dealt with this a few times, it's not obvious which set of instructions will both result in usable drivers and not break upon kernel update. I now have a "how to install Centos 7" document that I'm still not sure is actually 100% correct.
Linux comes with strings attached. On the other hand I had to deal with Win7 issues as well (such as the Windows Updater hogging up 50% of the processor) which weren't easy to fix either. In hindsight, it's on par. On Linux, it's easy to switch to a previous kernel, I like that really. And I use timeshift before critical updates.
The only concession I did, was to buy an HP printer recently because of HP's support on Linux.