FWIW, my impression of Carmack's comments on nVidia's drivers relative to ATi:
I feel Nvidia still has somewhat better driver quality (ATI continues to improve, though).
Clearly he views nVidia to have better driver quality, and ATi to be progressing in this respect.... that much isnt in doubt.
My interpretation of his wording is that nVidia's driver support is better though not dramatically so.
Were he to view the differences as dramatic I believe he would have said "much better", "significantly better", "vastly superior" or something of the like.
Similarly, I suspect if he thought nVidia only had a very slight advantage he would have said something like "incrementally better", "slightly better", "mildly better" or any other term denoting a small margin.
ie. He seems to be of the opinion that ATi's drivers are good but nVidia is clearly superior however ATi is quite useable if one believes their hardware to be preferable to use.
On another level, he comments that ATi "continues to improve".
Hence ATi's has clearly been improving for a fair length of time in his opinion. Were ATi just beginning to improve he would have stated they had "started to improve" or"they have made recent strides of late" ... something denoting a recent improvement that had not been evident before.
In any case, I suggest people here allow themselves to form their own opinions based upon their own experiences before factoring in anything else.
Carmack's opinion is certainly of considerable merit, but I would suggest wide spread opinion on this forum to be of equal if not superior merit.
The opinion of oneself formed from one's own experiences is the #1 factor however.
If you have good experiences with Company A's driver support, then those experiences remain good..... regardless of how many other people may like/dislike said companies drivers. Similarly, all the developers in the world can swear on record company A is horrible.... but if your experiences are positive then view company A positively one's OWN experiences are worth more then everyone else's combined.
In short, form your own educated opinion... don't inherit your opinion from someone else.
Take it into account, and learn from it but do not use it as your own opinion.