Canonical and Qualcomm have announced a collaboration to bring Ubuntu and Ubuntu Core to Qualcomm devices, with the latter joining Canonical's silicon partner program.
It starts with them only doing initial talks about buying their hardware for a project with you for a 7-figure payment, and doesn't improve from there.
No x86 is pretty much the only Platfrom I'm aware of where you can build a generic Kernel that will work with pretty much any hardware configuration out of the box.