Linux is ready for the webbrowser. Office? No, MS Office does not run and still the marketshare for MS Office is very high on Windows. It does not run on Linux. If the alternatives were better then people would use them. Gaming? Maybe for Steam OS but that is only one distro. If you choose something else you will not have such smooth experience. The user might be better off by moving to console. Any business tool like Adobe or custom built Windows tools does not work. This is very hard to change. Hence many can’t even move to mac os due to this. Media Player/View Pictures? Yes, Linux is ready here.
Can you choose to have Linux pre installed on a new laptop? No, not normally.
There is still some work to do. I hope we get there. We are close for home users.
Personally I use Fedora with Firefox.
No. I dont want that. Look for something that I actually want and try not to add it to the Google graveyard.