Couple of things - replace "majority of new" with "ivy bridge chipsets ". A lot of people actually buy sandy bridge or even AMD you know.
Second, while I share somewhat common opinions on Unity, this particular example is a kernel bug. Most likely, ubuntu will backport those changes to 12.04 or has already provided a ppa for a newer kernel.
Well, I work at a Linux shop, and I don't know anyone who would buy an AMD laptop to run Linux on it. And it's been more than two months since IvyBridge release, so a laptop that runs SandyBridge is probably not technically new (it can be never used, but already morally old... :)
Yes, this is a kernel issue, already fixed in 3.3.x. But Canonical has no intention of backporting it to 12.04 (3.2 kernel). And we are talking here about "just working", not installing an unsupported kernel manually from a dev repository.
Second, while I share somewhat common opinions on Unity, this particular example is a kernel bug. Most likely, ubuntu will backport those changes to 12.04 or has already provided a ppa for a newer kernel.