Which printer manufacturers don't make drivers for Macs? I don't know of any. Even really old printers from the pre-OS X era work fine, because of CUPS and Gutenprint. It's plug and play, the drivers are downloaded automagically.
The ones that I have had the most "See Note 7"* moments with have been large multifunction workgroup printers that you would find in any office - of varying manufacturers. these printers all claim to have mac drivers, and generally these claims are terrible, terrible lies.
Completely agree. One color laser MFC we recently replaced had a scanner that could only be used over the USB port for Macs but over ethernet for Windows. The workaround we found was scan to email which tended to be more reliable for Mac and Windows.
Now we have a new hotrod HP MFC that does everything and supports iOS and Android. It was also 1/3 the price.
The parent was talking about the MF part of a MFC printer being nonexistant for the Mac. Hell any printer with a USB port will work on a Mac. Any $50 printer can do that. But when you spend $200+ on a network MFC most come up short on the Mac side.
"Compare that with getting a Mac to print to any printer that wasn't specifically designed with macs in mind... torture."
Like you said, printing is not a problem in OS X. As for the other functions of a MFC, I agree: it's hit-and-miss. But that wasn't what OP was complaining about.
Printing is no picnic either, as any cursory browse through discussions.apple.com, support.apple.com, or any of the many mac-centered tech forums will attest. Here's a few examples, by no means exhaustive:
And any search for "<<printer manufacturer>> mac not working" will produce scads of results, often taking you to discussions that are dozens of pages long with people who can't print from their macs to any number of printers. This is a real problem, not a figment.
That's proof that there's a lively online Mac community, nothing more.
Guess what? Any search for "<<printer manufacturer>> windows not working" will also produce scads of results, often taking you to discussions that are dozens of pages long with people who can't print from their Windows PCs to any number of printers. The same can be said about most GNU/Linux distributions.
The only support forums where no one complains are those of products that no one uses.
> It's plug and play, the drivers are downloaded automagically.
and this:
>Like you said, printing is not a problem in OS X.
This is obviously and clearly not true, but you seemed to need evidence which I provided. In addition, in my experience the compatibility of macs and printers is far worse than windows and printers.
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht3669#Gutenprint