If someone steals your laptop, then sudo limiting guesses is completely irrelevant. Note that I started with
> I will absolutely say that a distro making that claim should not worry about the difference between 3 and 10 password attempts on sudo (i.e. when you're already logged in).
If you'd like to point out that it's really important to require a high-entropy password for the lockscreen or disk encryption, then I'll agree, but that isn't the argument we're in right now.