Hmm Interesting. What version of Red Hat did you use? I ask because while installing Fedora on my laptop, I have experienced none of those issues. I have two printers defined--one at work attached to a Windows machine over a Novell network, and one at home attached to a Win98 machine. Both work fine with no extra drivers.
My laptop uses a M10 ATI Radeon 9600 and I have had zero issues. I also have a DVDRW/CDRW drive and no issues.
I've needed no extra drivers once I installed the OS.
I'm just wondering if you used an older version of Redhat, rather than the curent one (at the time you installed it).
It was prior to the latest release (Fedora 5) and I remember that one of our issues was that the version we had just bought on disk had already been updated and we had to do some initial downloading to bring it up to date. I was the project manager and was overseeing the employees doing the installs. All were experienced computer users, but none were professional techs. It was important to us to see how easy it was to install, so the users handled the install. These guys had worked with Macs and Windows machines and were pretty comfortable with installing software and hardware. Like I said, most of the install went well, but each machine had at least one issue. These computers were from Dell, Compaq, and Gateway. I suspect that proprietary hardware may have been to blame in most cases, but it was still an issue.
I would not feel comfortable recommending Linux to someone buying their first computer. Such a user would be more comfortable, in my opinion, with a Mac or Wintel.