That's great so long as nVidia supports your card. The problem with the binary drivers is that they typically only support a percentage of all the cards the video maker makes.
For example, I can't use the ATI binary driver on my laptop since it no longer supports the R250 chipset, only their latest 3 or 4 generations of cards. So I have to use the OSS driver, which works great with it.
I have been able to use both the OSS and proprietary drivers on my desktop with an nVidia card, but I don't know how much longer that will last.

nVidia's proprietary driver is good namely because it is the same at the core as on Windows and Mac, and they wrap it to make it work with the *nix kernels. However, they also do a lot of other funky stuff and keep people from being able to fully use the full extend of X. Just search this list (among others) for xRanderer and other components of X and you'll see the full story of nVidia's proprietary driver.

Ben

From: App Deb <appdebgr@gmail.com>
To: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org
Sent: Tue, July 27, 2010 5:29:10 AM
Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] Re: State of Radeon drivers

If you are going to use any *nix, nvidia is the best option for years now. The nvidia closed source drivers are of professional quality and have great performance. Actually they are the *standard* for graphics in *nix, and many (professional or not) applications actually support only nvidia.

The ati oss driver is still under development, sometimes it works ok, sometimes not, and it is mostly for basic desktop usage and in my opinion it is progressing too slow. Anyway, I don't like having a driver that uses 10% of my hardware's capabilties. So until it actually reaches 100% (like the rest of the linux drivers) I can't recommend ATI on linux and nvidia is the way to go.

On Mon, Jul 26, 2010 at 7:32 PM, Florian Philipp <lists@f_philipp.fastmail.net> wrote:
Am 26.07.2010 01:01, schrieb James:
> Florian Philipp <lists <at> f_philipp.fastmail.net> writes:
>
>
>> I have a quick question: I plan to buy a notebook with an ATI Mobility
>> Radeon HD 4250. How well would that one work? Can I reasonably expect
>> Suspend2Ram, 3d acceleration etc to work stable?
>
> Well, lots of good information previously posted. Here's a
> few more tidbits. When ATI video get's older, there's
> always good opensource solutions to keep using it. Nvidia,
> sometimes you toss in garbage can, or use vesa or
> get lucky? Dunno, as I personally avoid Nvidia; other
> insist on Nvidia..... kinda a religious thing with some.....
>

Hehe, religious is the right word. I remember a situation at my
workplace: The admin of our departement IT ordered a Linux workstation
with (fully supported) ATI graphics. At the last second he was overruled
by the head of our institute's IT in favor of a completely unsupported
and more expensive NVidia card. Not only did the poor guy have to wait
two more weeks for the shipment to arrive, he was also stuck with the
VESA driver for half a year and unstable NVidia drivers ever since.

Well, thanks everyone who answered! Problem solved.

Florian Philipp