Poor SMART support on SATA and GNU-Linux

Of my two SATA drives (Seagate and Samsung) and one external USB2 (Western Digital) all bought within the last 12 months, none support the SMART standard according to GNU-Linux's nifty smartctr util. It's areas like this where the OS is lacking, and Windows tools seem to manage to monitor devices ok, so perhaps this is a Linux kernel issue? Whatever the underlying cause is.. vendors need to get together with distros and other stakeholders and resolve the issue!