It would work the same as when you bought an IBM clone in the old days. You couldn't use the hardware without running software from another company (Microsoft's MS-DOS).
Yeah but the IBM clones were only produced after painstaking reverse engineering of the BIOS. So basically nouveau, which already exists, but with much more work put in due to there being a greater upside. Though I think this analogy is a bit strained, for the most part the drivers aren't running on the device you're buying, hence the Linux driver being an issue at all.
