And you really think, people who are willing and able to buy enterprise support for their Linux distro get confused by the naming?
No, I don't think that. I *know* that because I'm active in the community.
OpenSuse is essentially free marketing for SUSE, nobody would know them otherwise.
That is absolute nonsense. SUSE mostly serves large enterprise customers. That's an entirely different demographic from people who care about Desktop Linux or setting up a home server.
Edit:
its market share is relatively small compared to Red Hat or Canonical.
I'm pretty sure SUSE is bigger than Canonical.
Editedit: According to wikipedia SUSE's revenue is about twice as high as Canonical's