Of course it might not make sense economically for SuSE to go after home PC harware issues, but server side that would be a great service to customers I think and may be a way to gain some new customers for SLES.
The problem is that a device can appear to be working for simple stuff, but still be quite broken (fall over with any significant load or have other problems). That is actually not that uncommon. The only way to catch these is to run longer stress tests. That is what the SUSE Linux hardware certification does. Also it would still not help with the problem the original poster had - that devices are filled under different names in the hardware database. Unfortunately device vendors tend to be quite creative at giving even identical cards new names, or sometimes even changing the hardware silently without changing the name :/ -Andi