Yeah, but that "tricky" part can take a really long time for someone who doesn't have much experience compiling a kernel. It took me two days to get a 2.6 kernel working on my laptop, but I think that's largely because it's a new laptop and Linux drivers were somewhat hard to find and they took more configuration and setup than I was familiar with. I had a really hard time getting ALSA working properly. In fact, I don't think I ever got it working 100% the way I wanted it to. I think I posted something about a headphones jack here.
Just because you can compress the process into a vague, step-by-step list doesn't mean that it's always a trivial task...