Daniel Burrows writes "and the built-in graphics card (usually Intel) on the motherboard is just fine for that."

I would agree with you, if I had an built-in graphics card with Intel.

That is in fact what I'm aiming for for my next laptop. But actually none of the PCs I have in my house has Intel graphics, unfortunately. Intel graphics is pretty much restricted to Core CPUs and Laptops. Which sucks.

I wish there would be more "budget" systems with Intel graphics. As you mentioned I don't need high end graphics anyway. I actually don't need high end CPU anyway (power consumption is more interesting, and the value/price ratio). I wish I could have bought a system with Intel graphics, but that would have been twice the price.

I wish we had some standard like VESA, just a bit more modern. Like having sane refresh rates for non-TFT screens and maybe some extra acceleration.

Oh, and I actually doubt that ATI would give away much secrets if it would allow distributing the existing opensource X drivers. It's not as if the specs of their CPU would be a huge surprise to Nvidia. Some actually say nvidia builds the better graphics cards. And Intel does even give away source code. We're not talking about chip design here, or driver optimizations. Just the plain registers and ports. heck, ATI, Nvidia and Intel could probably even agree on a standard here, except it would mean they'd need to change their drivers and hardware for the next generation with really no visible benefit to them (only to us, we could maybe run the basics with the same driver).

ATI is reported to not plan to release their drivers into OpenSource. Too bad. And I don't plan to buy any more ATI graphics. I'll go with Intel.

Actually it would be sufficient if they would release the specifications. We don't really want to see their "patented optimizations" (which probably are just for cheating in known 3D benchmarks anyway, so what would we gain from that?).

We'd be happy if we were allowed to distribute the already written independent driver. Which is blocked by an NDA, not by some "patented optimizations".

Anyway, I'll buy a new laptop end of this year, and guess what - it will have Intel graphics. They've already released drivers for their next chip to be released.

My current laptop, an IBM Thinkpad A31p, has an ATI graphics board. Which is not supported by the ATI driver. Fortunately there is an opensource driver which works fine, with 3D acceleration. Another reason I'm not going to buy any ATI, you never know when they decide to no longer support your board.