First I tried Debian Etch, but I did not get the NVidia drivers to work and I only had the wrong screen resolution, making everything stretched. I tried to fix it, but thinking of the wireless which also needed drivers and configuration I though it better to try Ubuntu straight away. And with success. Everything worked straight out of the box: X, wireless, sound, etc. Even a a GUI pocket calculator pops up when I press the little button above the above the keyboard. Maybe I can configure this button to do something useful.
One thing that was confusing, both with Debian and Ubuntu, is the GRUB boot menu that is automatically installed. On boot up, besides the Linux entries, I got two identically named Windows entries: "Windows Vista/Longhorn (loader)" one directing to (hd0,0) and one to (hd0,1) - but you can't see that unless you hit 'e'. The (hd0,1) got me into into the HP Recovery process, and canceling it got me into an infinite loop of rebooting, starting the recovery process, canceling it, reboot, etc., without GRUB. I had to reinstall GRUB into the master boot record from a Linux live CD and remove the (hd0,1) from /boot/grub/menu.lst.
But now, everything works just fine. :-)

nvidia updates excellent.no need download kernel and compile anymore.updates using yast also update,rebuild and reinstall nividia to current installed kernel.however recompile of other apps needed (as expected) e.g. vmware workstation.
Unfortunately no xen download available yet from yast.

opensuse 10.3 bluetooth also well with default install (with update) and network manager interface control for network devices - included in kernel. though does appear less troublesome to connect and runs faster with windows on same machine (dual boot). expect updates will improve.

Fedora 8 works out of the box on this guy, without installing any extra propriety nvidia drivers (just using nv). Bluetooth also appears to work; I could see 3 other computers and a phone by clicking on "Detect Devices". I'm impressed.