Applications, libraries and
sometimes drivers might get backported but you can't backport core kernel stuff to older kernels. You'd just end up with the newer kernel.
And since hardware support is entirely dictated these days by kernel version I definitely don't agree about Ubuntu having the best hardware support. Software, sure, since its libraries and architecture are what devs target, but a newer kernel will always support more hardware.
RHEL/Debian being better for production is contextual. The 'stability' thing is broadly misunderstood. They're not 'more stable' in the sense of being less buggy, older software generally has more bugs and vulnerabilities. They're stable in the sense of being an un-moving platform, so if one is
building something on top of it, one doesn't have to continually re-write. i.e. they offer stability in the 'stable API' sense, which is beside the point for this application.
Non-buggy stability tends to come with fresh packages and un-fucked-with upstream code, which you certainly don't get with RHEL and Debian. Which explains why Arch is the least-buggy/crashy distro I've ever used.
EDITED: 13 Aug 2014 01:05 by X3N0PH0N