Good Media Centre OS?

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Yeah, most are - I misread "cannot get my tuner to work with the later kernel" as "it falls over" where it could just require small tweaks to the makefile or code and no-one's bothered doing that for the later kernels.

They are? I have never had a problem with NVidia drivers which is why I stick with NVidia graphics cards. I briefly used ATI cards for a while before that and they were fine. Matrox, however, certainly were not.
Since they're less common they're likely to cause less of a problem but anyway, it's always a good idea to choose carefully and research the support level for specialist devices - but if manufacturers would simply stop being so damned anal with their device details or expect developers to sign handcuff NDA's then things will only improve, although there still seems to be many devices that are adequately supported.
Ah - so your issue with "Linux isn't appropriate as a media centre OS" comes down to your personal idea of what looks pretty. Fair enough, but that's nothing to do with the OS and everything to do with someone willing to spend more time than is strictly necessary to add those little curly, twiddly bits that glitter nicely to the application's UI.
Didn't those other Linux UIs impress either? It's the same principle, only the MythTV UI isn't as quite as frilly.
Oh well.

Is that the USB stick device I found very few references to?
Or to put it another way - do you have any manufacturer's links?

One thing that I'd like to point out, which is completely overlooked, is that Linux is the OS of choice for many cable companies DVR's, so if your have a Digital Cable/ DVR setup, you already are running Linux as your media center OS.

Yeah, the UI isn't pretty, but it functions as designed, which the way that it should be

^^ Yeah, excellent points.
Including TiVo: http://www.garysargent.co.uk/tivo/tivoinaction.htm
(mentioned only because it's practically a household name)

I've never seen a UI on Linux I felt was fully baked. Not in any piece of software I have ever seen, with the possible exception of browsers, but there's not much UI to a browser.

I'm not just expecting things to look streamlined, although I do expect that; there is more to design than that and you know it. It's also about the presentation of information in the most efficient manner based on my needs, and the shortest path of resistance to get the program doing what I want it to. Linux apps, including the aforementioned, are lacking in all of these areas. Why wouldn't they be? They don't employ full time, senior designers. Those designers are working for money. Most of the commonly used Linux programs have UIs that were designed by the programmer. I have pretty good design sense for a software engineer, but I know I am outgunned by the professionals and stick to what I do.

I have had all sorts of problems with Linux graphics drivers, and I have also developed them myself for one of the companies you mentioned, so I know what the issues are. No company puts as much time into debugging its Linux production drivers as they do for Windows, and the amount of time they dedicate to Apple drivers is somewhere between the two. That debugging time makes the difference between something I want to use and something I want to keep far away from me, and there are many man years involved in that.

When I think of Microsoft and that ribbon interface I get a better understanding of just how bad things can get when designed by "professionals".

I have also worked on display drivers and I too know what some of the problems are with some drivers for Windows - and yet I still have no problems with NVidia drivers on Linux. Guess I'm just lucky.

I actually like the ribbon interface. I know some people prefer the Office 2003 UI, but that too was designed by professionals. OO's UI isn't as bad as its bug count, but OO (at some point, seemingly about a decade ago) benefitted from the contributions of professional UI designers. It's primitive now. Probably the most overriding reason Linux never took off as a desktop OS is that streamlined design, efficient presentation, and least resistant path to getting what you want never existed on it. You can't even argue that they did. You might as well argue that Blackberries did too.

I agree that some Windows drivers (notably ATI's earlier drivers) were hideous. ATI's newer drivers are still bloated but at least there are fewer bugs. The process of merely installing display drivers on Linux is ridiculous, the drivers have too many tentacles into the kernel. I believe Windows 8 (or its successor) supports user mode display drivers. I know from experience that you can run a PCI device efficiently from user mode on Linux, but doing it with a display driver that provides a front end for the entire machine would require major rearchitecture. This is representative of Linux getting just a little crusty in its old age. I still respect the kernel.