besides being a big name, didn’t bring much.
Absolutely wrong. A lot of old and dated information in your post.
They have something no one else has: manufacturing, and very low price and great performance after recent driver updates. They just lack the driver stability which has been making leaps and bounds.
I do not think anyone else can enter the market, let alone with an edge.
The “distro” would be reduced to a configuration file base (which Id be all for imo).
On that note, Nix desperately needs officially supported config sharing social system like dotfyle.