Codecs are a legal grey area that many distros are choosing to include out of convenience since there has not been a problem before. Since Fedora is associated with Red Hat/IBM which have a lot of money and are bigger targets for lawsuits, they are choosing to play it safe by not officially supporting many codecs. It is the same with openSUSE.
Huh? That has gotten very easy with the RPMfusion repos for those drivers especially being enabled by default so you can just install them from the main software center. But this isn't exactly new.
i recently tried fedora kde spin and the drivers definitely weren't in the software center. and i don't like gnome so i didn't try the official one, but i did suspect that the official one could be more user friendly. good to know.