The problem with telemetry is that it often happens in secret. You can never tell what it’s collecting and when it is sending it. When it happens in the open, than it can be great. Steam Hardware Surveys are a great example of this, you can see exactly what it sends and when, you can opt-out of it before it sends anything and you even get to look at the results of the survey.
That’s the kind of thing I’d love to have for Linux. Couple that with what errors are showing up in the kernel logs, what software versions people are running, and it would make it much easier to chose the right hardware for Linux.