Xorg by default uses a threshold based mouse acceleration. This is not very good for modern mice, and increasing the acceleration usually just makes the mouse jumpy and imprecise. Xorg also support a much better exponential mouse acceleration similar to the one in Windows and Mac OS X which can be enabled by setting the threshold to 0. This should be used by default. Upstream bug report: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=93445 Related xorg bug: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8583
I agree things could be better, but let's stick to keeping things on the upstream report.