I will leave it to one of the others who are more closely involved in the project to explain fully but I wanted to give you some information to get you started.  If you check out the page for SW and Getting Sputnk Up and Running you will find the following information.

Hardware enablement

In putting together the project, the area that we focused on first was hardware enablement.  As Linux users are all too painfully aware, Linux drivers are not always available for various platforms.  We have been working hand in hand with Canonical, the commercial sponsor behind Ubuntu and identified three main areas on the XPS13:

1. 1. An issue with brightness
   2. The Wifi hotkey
2. The touchpad and multi touch support

The first two were resolved  by the time of announcement.  The third, the touchpad and multi touch support has been recently resolved.

This I understand, but the dellxps image page states "this image is not considered an official Ubuntu release" and "this image is not officially supported."  What does this mean?  For a general user like me (not a developer) would it be better to load the supported image directly from Ubuntu and add the dellxps ppa's?  

I did the official Ubuntu 12.04 LTS 64bit install using the USB method as explained on the Ubuntu site. Then I just added the PPA's like you said. Woks great. Here's my post about it:  ken-mcconnell.com/.../loading-the-dell-xps-13-with-ubuntu

I'm a general user too.

Thanks for posting that Ken!  I'll still rely on others to point out any differences between the two install packages but I'm happy to hear how smoothly yours went.  I tweeted out a link to your blog post via the IdeaStorm account just now. Nicely written post. Please, keep us updated with your progress. 

Thanks Ken!

I'm about to buy a low end XPS13 (i5 and 128GB SSD) and was hoping to find someone that had already tried the Sputnik Project on this machine!

Your how-to is a valuable plus to my search... =)

(And thanks to Cy to point me here!)

There is one very significant difference between the Sputnik ISO and the off-the-shelf Ubuntu ISO that I learned the hard way.  Where the Ubuntu ISO gives you options for installation, such as dual boot, etc., the Sputnik ISO completely erases your drive (inncluding the Dell recovery partition) and installs only Ubuntu.  So, if you want to dual boot, or if you want to preserve your Windows recovery partition, don't use the Sputnik ISO.

I downloaded the Sputnik ISO from hwe.ubuntu.com/.../

However, I cannot get the Startup Animation. My XPS 13 did not come loaded with Ubuntu. As such, I had to go this route.

How do I get the startup animation to work? Any help would be greatly appreciated.