Ever since I've been asking this question, the predominant answer has been something to the effect of "well one day we'll have free drivers so we can just ignore the problem"
But, in the meantime, NVidia-settings has been so awful it's been scaring users away from Ubuntu for the past 4 years. If you have multiple monitors, or want to change resolution, NVidia-settings gives a horrible experience. On multiple occasions I've seen it, singlehandedly, convince a user that Linux was "not ready".
Most of the stuff in there doesn't even make sense -- for instance there's a completely useless "write to xorg.conf" button that is incredibly scary.
So what can we do?