My grudge against Compaq lies in their awful non-server class products (laptops to desktops)

Agreed to some extent. Some of the Armada (and now Evo) laptops are decent. And the high end Deskpro's are also rather nice. Mostly due to seperate design companies then the Presario (eww) line.

and in the fact that they bought DEC/Digital and let it languish

Agreed on this one to some point. Compaq mainly bought Digital for their service department, and it helped to turn the support around. But the death of the Alpha sucks. By now it could have been refined to not only be a server chip, but also a laptop chip.

When asked about installing Solaris (I think -- could have been Linux) on them, they responded by stating that it would void the hardware warranty.

Odd, considering Solaris works and is certified on most of the Proliant servers, as is Linux. Compaq has quite a few projects over on Sourceforge.net as well.