Dumped 94.36.19 in favor of a different machine

"At no time does Ubuntu research for any resources from the new motherboard."

What do you mean by that, and how do you back that claim up? Have you examined logs and attached a kernel debugger so that you know what is going on when you boot the modified-hardware system?

"For instance, Windows is generic enough to work between systems IFF the generic under pinnings satify the hardware."

That has not been my experience, but I suppose one's mileage may vary. Or I might be misunderstanding what you mean by "generic underpinnings."

"I wonder what it would take to get Linux to this point?"

Most of us measure the quality of an operating system by how well it performs the functions it is designed to perform, or functions that a significant percentage of users would actually want to have. For an installed Ubuntu system to be reliably movable from one computer to another without any reconfiguration by the user would require that developers spend time on that instead of other things. However, I suppose that, if there are developers who are interested in this, they could work on it. This seems like the sort of thing that could only happen because of a developer "scratching a personal itch." Whether or not the work would be merged into Ubuntu would probably depend on whether or not it resulted in Ubuntu booting way slower every time you start up your computer.

However, this is not a limitation of Linux. Linux is a kernel, and there are Linux-based systems that have this functionality, like live systems.

You should be able to create something that is like a live CD, but on a hard drive, such that it is highly portable from one machine to another. See https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LiveUsbPendrivePersistent. This should work fine on an internal or otherwise non-USB drive.

As for your present situation, if the problem really is that Ubuntu is not booting at all, then it seems likely that you could render your system bootable by reinstalling GRUB2 to the Master Boot Record: http://www.webtechquery.com/index.php/2010/04/install-grub2-from-live-cd/

If recovery mode menu items appeared to work but others (besides memtest) did not, then perhaps the problem is that the new system has a different video card and the wrong video drivers are being used. You can confirm this by pressing Alt+F1. If you get a text-based login prompt, it means that Ubuntu has booted, but was not able to start the graphical user interface. In that case, it is not true that "not one menu item" worked--in that case, the menu item you selected in the boot loader worked, but the X server (and possibly also Plymouth, if you didn't see a splash screen) failed to work once the system booted.

It is true that, compared to Ubuntu and most non-live Linux-based operating systems, Windows tends to more reliably fall back to a generic low-resolution video mode when video drivers no longer work or the video hardware has been changed drastically. If that's the functionality you wish were better in Ubuntu, then I agree, and I think most other people would too. (After all, moving a hard drive with an installed system from one computer to another is an unusual act, but replacing a computer's video card with another video card of a different brand is very frequently done.) And that should be practically implementable. You might want to search to see if this has been discussed at http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com, consider contributing to an existing discussion, or if there is no such topic, post a new topic about it.

Finally, please note that the problem might not be that Ubuntu fails to recognize the new video card because of the abrupt change. It might be that, if and when you do a fresh installation of Ubuntu on that machine, you'll experience the same problem. In that case, the problem has to do with properly using the new card, but it has nothing to do with the movability of already installed Ubuntu systems or their ability to function under a change of video hardware. (Sometimes the problems you are describing occur on a **newly installed** Ubuntu system.)