Linux is not held back.
I don't think people understand what Linux is.
Firstly Linux is a kernel, that is important not from a pedantic viewpoint, but from understanding that hardware drivers are required, and that Linux is not an operating system or a distribution.
A distribution can be commercial or community based, community based doesn't have to return a profit or make market penetration, a commercial distribution does. Ubuntu and RedHat are commercial operating systems with a Linux kernel, and they care but no one else does, and the vast majority of people who use Linux for development don't use those two distributions.
Not many people have jumped ship to Mac, instead what you have seen is Linux people advocate Mac over Windows and Linux distributions, to general users.
Linux was not developed to somehow affect the Windows market, it was developed as a challenge for those who found minix boring.
No one likes to develop end user (numpty) applications for nothing, those you pay for, applications for numpties will never be gratis, what you think of as polish, developers see as wasted development time, and lost CPU cycles.
GNU was designed to take on commercial Unix and it is being doing a pretty good job of that.
Google Chrome is a Linux distribution, as is Splashtop and Asus gateway, that means that Linux will eventually have the largest market penetration, it may actually have the largest penetration on computer systems as whole already.
The fragmentation of the Linux distributions is what makes Linux great, probably not great for numpties, but great for developers and operating system builders, it is brilliant.
Choice means that you have many different viewpoints on how an operating system can be built and distributed, it also means that Linux has many heads, and that offers security, stability and extensive testing. Linux as a kernel ain't going anywhere, there are too many experts who can step in.
And the interoperability between Linux distributions is again excellent, you can quite easily jump between distributions if you know what you are doing.
You hear this bunkum and FUD from people who are just not in the field of Information Technology, they are at best neophytes struggling probably to use a decent editor. And somehow they think they can tell everyone else to follow their over simplified, simplistic, retarded line of consolidation of distributions. Not only is it just plain wrong from a technical viewpoint, too many people will just laugh in your face at an attempt to control their projects.
The Linux kernel is forked to the nines with patches, and bloody good job to, it allows you to select best of breed for the custom deployment of a system.
The main problem is people outside of IT want to make IT simple for numpties, but for those in IT there is no advantage for them to do that, as it is quite simple already, so it will cost.
If you want Linux Market Penetration put your money or your coding skills where your gob is and make a distribution that will get that market penetration, don't ask others for that, most of us are quite happy with what we have and how things are going. I suspect you neither have the money or the skills Jason Fossen, so for you I would advise you get a Mac :)