Very true, the trend with PC hardware these days is to make access to the peripheral devices (e.g. USB hosts, audio/video etc) more and more difficult because technical information is "proprietory" i.e. secret, and therefore not so easy to find. The manufacturers will only supply drivers for specific operating systems like Windows which makes writing a new operating system much more difficult (on purpose of course )
Even the internal system busses which the peripherals attach to are becoming more complex (e.g. PCIe) although at least their specifications are generally publically available .