What do you expect from Linux? It's a tinkerer's OS. I think you suffered from a bad choice of distro. Knoppix is a Linux for people who don't want to actually keep Linux on their machine; it's a disc you throw in the drive when your normal OS breaks down Everything is on the disc, so even if you whole hard drive is shot, you can do a hardware check, get online and print off some documentation before fixing your drive. There are TONS of good programs for Linux, they're just not consumer-oriented. I can think of dozens of science, engineering, and arts apps for POSIX systems that are indispensable - this server is probably running a POSIX OS, or at the very least a POSIX-compliant Windows code library. If somebody knew enough about Windows to write a Windows emulator, why would they bother to use something so inferior as a Linux box? Probably because some people have better things to do than throw endless amounts of time and money into a machine that's supposed to make their life simpler.
There are a decent share of games on Linux, if a little dated in some regards - there are clones of a lot of popular TBS/RTS games in particular. Nerds are easily amused and not always the best graphic artists, so you have to take these homebrew games with a grain of salt, but there's some good stuff out there. And no other platform gets working emulators faster. POSIX OSes run on so many types of hardware it's difficult for a conventional game studio to write a game and call it 'Linux compatible.' Properly installed, it's a very capable OS, but you need to take some time to learn how it works before you can make it do any cool stuff, and it's not econmically feasable to rely on consumers to do that. Most people with a Linux box have access to a souped-up Windows machine for gaming, so it's usually a nonissue anyways.
As for Apple's inferior hardware... how have the problems with Apple been any different that the ones with Dell, Sony, HP, Toshiba, etc.? If you look, all the big computer brands buy the same parts for their machines - whatever model China manufactures cheapest. Higher prices are the kiss of death to consumer electronics; people won't buy your junk if the other guys' junk does the same thing for $50 less. You see runs of faulty gear all the time. It's really not uncommon, and certainly not limited to single brand.
~Joe