You don't necessarily need the terminal for all tweaking; the proprietary graphics drivers have a graphical tool that's called Catalyst Control Center that also lets you set up some stuff. Fedora is also has the new Gallium-based open source drivers, which perform much better than the old open-source driver, and have a good chance of getting much better in the future. The proprietary driver works great for games, but not for desktop compositing (Gnome 3, for example, becomes pretty much unusable (please no "Gnome 3 already was unusuable" jokes :P)). I have a very modest laptop with an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4330 in it and Linux native games run faster than they do compared to their Windows counterparts. Wine games that rely on DirectX will be slower than their Windows counterparts, because Wine has to translate every instruction into OpenGL. Wine is also not guaranteed to run *all* games yet. Older games almost always do great, however (played Star Trek: Elite Force just fine, for example). If you do heavy gaming, also keep Windows around a bit longer for that. Linux is good for gaming, but not so good at most heavy, modern games because it has to rely on Wine which naturally adds a slowdown factor because of the graphics emulation.
