I've also got the impression that even just slightly older hardware might be easier to get working than the very latest generation. This may be even more true for distros that don't ship new kernels in a rolling release style. (Fedora continuously updates to new minor/patch versions of the kernel as they're released; I'm not sure what Ubuntu does nowadays but I think they used to only patch the kernel version that was shipped at the time of the release.)
I think the idea of $random_component_vendor maintaining an up-to-date Linux driver themselves may be unrealistic, and laptop vendors probably won't be doing that for all of their components either. At least on Linux that tends to involve being a competent kernel developer, too, at least if you want to be the maintainer of the driver in kernel upstream.
If the OEMs that are interested in Linux support collaborated with distros and/or kernel/driver developers before the new hardware hits the shelves, even if they didn't plan on writing and supporting the drivers themselves, that might work. Otherwise there's always catching up to do, as you said.
For years now, I've also had nothing that didn't work on my now fairly old X240. Everything's pretty dandy. At some point the clickpad didn't work after resuming from suspend, though, and that was a major issue that really shouldn't happen on a laptop series that's supposed to have great Linux support.
Other than that (and the fingerprint reader initially not working even though it was supposed to be supported, but that wasn't a big deal), there's really been nothing that didn't work.