onethreealpha - I assumed there are some programs in the repos which are 64-bit which I could not run if I only had the 32-bit OS. WRT drivers my first experience with Linux (Red Hat provided by my school) agreed heavily with you that there were many drivers I could not find for the hardware I had (so I had to give up and changed over to Windows Vista Ultimate 64-Bit).
This is precisely the type of info I was looking for WRT the various Linux versions so feel free to keep it coming!
Looking things over I'm leaning toward Fedora (KDE Plasma), although I'm hearing negatives about the desktop interface of Fedora (those negative reports are 1/2 a year old though).