If you aren't blessed with luck, one might say that PulseAudio still requires you to be a hacker to get sound. Over and over again. Every time you think it's fixed for good, it'll prove you wrong.
On the large majority of laptops I've installed Ubuntu on recently, sound has just worked out of the box, so here's to hoping my lucky streak continues!
Sure, sound works fine for a bit, but wait until you want to plug a USB headset in. First time, great. Second time, fail. Log out, log back in, headset works again. Lame!
Add any external sound hardware, use a optical or SPDIF port instead, add some speakers. It'll break sooner-or-later, and in my own experiences it tends to be whenever my personal computer gets away from the 'typical' desktop profile.
Try to plug in headset and have the sound out of it, plug it out and have the sound on the laptop speakers, without going all hacker on it, or for example just try to use your bluetooth headset. Yeah. Nope.
Or if you're even less lucky, PulseAudio still requires you to mute the "system sounds" thing because once skype starts, you get persistent noise out of the audio jack, after which you try to email Lennart following the guide on his page, only to receive no reply.
