No. The actual manufacturer is different.
There is a lot of similarities between designs of different "manufacturers"
for various reasons. It is possible that a keyboard from an Acer laptop is
used in a Gigabyte laptop for instance. The critical designs are used by
multiple manufacturers and customized from an appearance perspective largely.
A system might use different generic / standard parts although the chipsets
in the main build are 100% identical. Actually figuring out what other
laptops are near identical is extremely difficult. Even once you do there is
zero chance that all the components are the same or compatible. For instance
the Acer system may look different than the Gigabyte system although the
motherboard is basically identical. The wireless cards, keyboards, screens,
etc in the Gigabyte system are likely to be different too.
There are very few companies producing any particular chipset or class of
device. There are only a handful of companies producing wireless chipsets.
There are only a handful of companies manufacture notebooks. You would not
recognize any of these companies by name.
The industry simply slaps together based on these bigger companies (companies
bigger than Dell, HP, Apple, etc) a particular configuration. The actual
hardware though is the same.
In most cases there is only one to a handful of designs. For instance a
particular wireless card with a particular chipset will have three different
"manufacturers". In reality they are all the same manufacturer and branded by
different companies. Take for instance a Dell wireless card. Dell didn't
really manufacture that. Someone else did. Dell just outsourced the packaging
and sells support.
We're actually doing more than Dell, Apple, and others in that we're working
to get the source code released for the chipsets that we use. Dell can't do
anything about a bug thats causing a problem. There dependent on the chipset
vendor.
There are a number of components that go into systems that work better
because the company actually doing the manufacturing is the same as the one
branding it. As a result bugs are getting fixed. This is rare though. By us
focusing on getting the source code released there are solutions / bug fixes
in many GNU/Linux drivers that aren't being fixed in the equivalent Microsoft
Windows drivers. This isn't to say every bug gets fixed if the source code is
released. This would be going too far. However there is at least an
opportunity for stuff to get fixed that otherwise wouldn't and that has
translated into the real world.
