If your device requires power management, and you know it requires power
management, why not just implement power management? Doing -ENOSYS
instead is like saying -ESPAMMEBECAUSEIMLAZY.
Let me put it another way: People keep talking about Linux being ready
for the desktop. To me at least (but I dare say for lots of other people
too), being ready for the desktop means that things just work, without
having to recompile kernels or bug driver authors or wait twelve
months.
And it means that doing a bare minimum isn't enough. We keep claiming
that Open Source is better than Proprietary software. If we accept
half-pie jobs of implementing support for anything - driver power
management support or hibernation support or whatever - as 'good
enough', we're undercutting that argument. Linux's power management
support should - as far as we're able - be at least as good as that
other operating system's and preferably way, way better.
-ENOSYS is just not acceptable.