The need to tweak that deeply just to get “baseline” performance really stings, though, particularly if you’re not already accustomed to having to do that kind of thing.

It’d be a gargantuan project, but there should probably be some kind of centralized, cross-distro repository for power configuration profiles that allows users to rate them with their hardware. Once a profile has been sufficiently user-verified and is well rated, distro installers could then automatically fetch and install the profile as a post-install step, making for a much more seamless and less fiddly experience for users.

Not trying to discredit your idea, but I feel like you're misrepresenting the amount of optimization apple does by calling it baseline.

It's generally the most optimized system down to the fact that Apple controls everything about it's platform.

If that's considered baseline, then nothing but full vertical integration can compete

The advantage of Apple is that they deal with a tiny amount of hardware. Vertical integration enables aggressive optimizations.

I agree that in case of Linux, a udev rule generator would be a fantastic step ahead in terms of usability.