As someone new to this, and fully in favour of open source / free software, it does seem that folks do get a little ideological about it, and that stands in the way of broader acceptance of Linux.
It is a royal pain in the arse to have to download a program and install it just to be able to watch DVDs, or read PDF files. No one new to the OS wants to be dealing with that kind of stuff. I can see why you might want a 'pure' version, but for most people out there there is room in the world for free and non-free software. I for one don't really, on a day to day basis, care whether Acrobat is 'free' or not. I guess if I sat down and thought about it I might, but it irritates me much more that the os I just installed can't read dvds without me having to download a patch and install it.