Most common hardware "drivers" are included with the distribution.
If you have specific hardware that doesn't work you'll have to deal with that. Best places I'd say to start are the Ubuntu Forms, the Ubuntu Wiki, and the Ubuntu Setup Guide
You'll probably end up downloading the drivers via apt or manually installing *.dep's with ipkg. In most cases, if you have a specific piece of hardware, one of the above 3 places will have full instructions telling you exactly what to do.
Unofficial Starter Guide:
http://ubuntuguide.org/
Official Ubuntu Wiki:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/
Official Ubuntu Web Forums:
http://www.ubuntulinux.org/community/forums
nVidia, for example, has linux drivers on their website, but ubuntu specific instructions can be found here on the wiki:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/BinaryDriverHowto/Nvidia?highlight=%28nVidia%29
Before you do anything though, immediately after installing Ubuntu I recommend you run AutoMatix which can easily configure lots of the common extras people generally do (such as the nVidia drivers, making web fonts nicer, or installing the official Adobe Acrobat):
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=66563
(just do a google search for Ubuntu automatix once you fire up the lappy ;) )
