I never really saw BSD as a desktop operating system, regardless what OSX achieved with Darwin.
It made for an amazing mailserver last I tried it though. I used 3.4 on an ancient P4 with maybe 256MB of RAM an 8GB hard drive. Turns out that was way more computer than it needs, and it was so stable I began to think of it the same way I think of my router.
The Radeon stuff is improving rapidly. You can't buy a diesel truck for the power and then complain that it won't take gasoline. ;-)
To hell w/ NVidia. If they won't play ball, I'll spend my money on an arguably slightly lesser performing product that is more open.
Though, currently the linux emulation layer in CURRENT has a change that broke the linux Flash binary. I've been flash-free for about 2 weeks now. I can't decide if that's a curse or liberation. Otherwise, I personally think FreeBSD is a mighty fine desktop OS. ZFS is really nice.
Eh? I run OpenBSD as a "desktop" and I use 3D acceleration to play 3D games and all that stuff. Even playing videos these days requires DRI support in the kernel. With a bit of careful hardware selection, 3D acceleration works out of the box on OpenBSD.
They all suffer from the good enough but not mainstream enough problem, i.e. official Nvidia drivers that are not officially supported.