Actually, I can't help thinking a much larger issue is marketing and fashion. Nobody except a few large proprietary software companies (Apple, Microsoft) have enough leverage to market heavily to average consumers. Most people do not make heavily researched, purely rational decisions about what to buy: they just get whatever they saw in an ad or whatever is in the store. In both cases, thanks to the obscene amount of money Apple and Microsoft put into distribution and advertising (as well as some monopolistic behavior), the most readily available computers run either Mac OS or Windows. Ubunutu is, in large part, successful because they at least have some marketing. If they managed to get Ubunutu laptops into stores, people would probably buy them. But then Microsoft would go out of its way to crush them (witness the Linux netbooks of a little while ago).
Stallman did write some brilliant software some time ago. Now, unlike Linus, he is concentrating on social issues of free software rather than on programming. And his advocacy has doubtlessly increased the use of the GPL, which has had some very concrete beneficial effects. For example, my understanding is that WebKit is largely free because it was originally forked from KHTML.
That's true for WebCore (the WebKit rendering engine), yes. But WebKit itself, actually, is BSD licensed and released just because Apple decided to release it. (About a year or so after WebKit was first publicly released, though, I think.)
Stallman did write some brilliant software some time ago. Now, unlike Linus, he is concentrating on social issues of free software rather than on programming. And his advocacy has doubtlessly increased the use of the GPL, which has had some very concrete beneficial effects. For example, my understanding is that WebKit is largely free because it was originally forked from KHTML.