Unrelated, but I've often found that upgrading hardware is usually easier to do when you're running Linux, and it complains far less. I run Arch primarily, though, so I don't think my commentary with regards to upgrade processes is worth much--being a rolling release distro, it's always in a state of flux so there's no real "major" upgrade unless I've forgotten to run updates for a month or two.

That said, I have updated (dist-upgrade) recent (12.04+) Ubuntu installs more or less unattended with no trouble. So I think the OP was probably a troll.

My existing (home) Arch install has survived through a couple different hard drives, copied over directly from a USB stick, with various hardware changes off and on since. Prior to that, I've had Gentoo and Ubuntu installs persist across substantial hardware changes mostly unscathed (Gentoo required preparations beforehand, mostly because I was an idiot and did extensive kernel customizations I probably didn't need).

I don't understand the trolling, though. There are far too many variables that might affect one particular OS/hardware combination more than others, and that's to say nothing of PEBKAC-related issues...