Linus has his reasons to be pissed. But from a desktop users' point of view, Nvidia has been the only vendor that has shipped working GPU drivers with 3d and video for the past decade. All other vendors have had worse drivers, sometimes even completely unusable or just buggy. The situation has improved, though.
Possibly, but their GPU drivers are also frustrating crap. Yes, AMD/ATI's drivers are far worse, but nvidia is still dropping the ball. Binary blobs in your kernel are bad for everyone. Kernel developers are often rightly uninterested in kernel problems that occur in environments that are "tainted" by black-box code. Nvidia's driver doesn't play nicely with the Linux GPU stack and ecosystem. Consider their "twinview" nonsense, requiring a legacy xorg.conf, and duplicating functionality present in the standardized xrandr 1.2. Fullscreen programs are an iffy proposition at best with nvidia's drivers, made even worse if you have multiple monitors, as a result of their refusal to work with the community and the standard tools.
A game developer as important as Valve officially supporting Linux has the potential to force nvidia to finally start playing nice, or even better, get their head out of their asses and just open-source their drivers and get them into the kernel. That way every nvidia user on Earth can benefit from an officially supported, open, community-driven driver.
Slim chance, but I would've said the same about native L4D2 if you'd asked me 2 months ago.
The nvidia driver codebase is HUUUGE, much of it is valuable proprietary information, and much of it is third party. It would be extremely challenging for nvidia to open source it, from both legal and business perspectives.
I do hold out hope for nvidia gaining full xrandr and kms support at some point. The latest beta drivers have significantly increased xrandr support.
Twinview is an implementation of Xinerama, which predates RandR and was standardized for X11 6.4. When nVidia released twinview, it was using (at the time) the standard way to achieve this functionality. They haven't moved to RandR or KMS, which is a bit of a pain granted, but that's a case of being stuck on older tech, not a case of ignoring what's out there.
It was mostly about desktop GPU drivers and he said nothing about them specifically. And it was most certainly not targeted at Tegra drivers. Tegra kernel parts are mostly open sourced (not the user space, though) and the Tegra kernel team is doing a lot of work that is important to running Linux on ARM SoC's, not just Tegra specific parts.
