Bluestealth

The only thing we know for sure is that they hate the GPL at their highest levels and are continually working to replace all GPL compatible code with APSL and CDDL code.

While this is true that a cable upgrade will not increase their bandwidth it has nothing to do with the transmission medium. Current Thunderbolt ports will support optical Thunderbolt cables if anyone chooses to release them. The whole cable is just like the TWINAX SFP+ networking cables.
Besides, Intel Silicon Photonics seems to be delayed indefinitely at the moment so I wouldn’t worry about a native optical Thunderbolt port for a while.

To be fair only some linux distributions bundle non-free codec packs, so your mostly in the same boat as Windows 8. When the patents surrounding MPEG2 and DVD playback have expired I would expect every linux distribution to have them included, but that is not today. I currently use Fedora, and Redhat really tries to bundle nothing non-free, except firmware. Although I know Ubuntu now asks you if you would like to install a non-free codec pack on install.

Since they don’t have Ken Levine, I really don’t care.