You're right of course. One "selling point" of the mandriva stick is that it will load proprietary drivers for any supported 3D card from the live USB stick. Its not too hard to achieve that with any other liveCD (/stick) but it does require a little script and work.

Still I tend to agree that if this is mandriva's business model, they will fail utterly.

£10 for an 8GB usb stick and download:

http://www.linuxliveusb.com/

along with your Live distro of choice.