To be fair starting with just the CD for Microsoft Windows NT, or a cheaper version, would bring most of the same problems. However the producer expects that most users will want Windows, and knows that they will not be selling many if they leave each customer to sort themselves out. The problems come from the fact that Laptops are very different from standard PCs. If you took the chips out of an office PC and tried to put them in a package the size of a laptop, you would find that they don't fit and the battery pack which has to run for hours could not last more than a few minutes. In order to save weight and power, many of the parts of a normal PC are replaced with something really quite different, which manages to look like parts in a desktop PC only if the software on the PC controls it slightly differently from what would be needed on a PC with motherboard and cards. The software which handles such a part is called a driver and laptop manufacturers provide their customers with a large number of special drivers for the laptop. Unfortunately these drivers are for Windows and don't help with Linux.
Just getting Linux onto a laptop is the first puzzle. To install on a normal PC, I could start by putting an installation CD in the drive, if the PC does not have a CD drive, it is easy enough to find a spare CD drive in the office and connect it. Most laptops don't have a CD drive as standard, and they don't take a standard CD drive anyway, we are already into an area where a special driver will be needed if we have the special laptop CD drive. Maybe someone has written a Linux driver for this laptop's CD-ROM drive, but this is the type of thing we would prefer to sort out on a running system, when we can use Linux to show us what is happening, it is not something we would choose to do by trial and error during the initial installation.
