If I recall correctly, the only hardware Linux really has trouble with these days includes nVidia cards, some winmodems (but not all, and it's not like people care about modems anymore), and some wireless cards, including the ones by Broadcom, which include the Airport Extreme. Although, to be a honest, a lot of people are ok with the nVidia drivers, and you can fake wireless support if you have the windows drivers using something called ndiswrap, I believe. I have not done this myself, though.

But yeah, things like USB and onboard video cards and all that work fine now, and installers do not generally require you to know every tiny detail of your system. The theory that you should always recompile your kernel to include exactly what you need and no more is also no longer followed by many people.