How is the power management? I run a linux (ubuntu) thinkpad for work, and while I find the OS pleasant to use, I have found the battery life dire compared to windows-using colleagues.
I run ubuntu 11.10 on a thinkpad and I find that battery life is on a par with Windows.
You might want to investigate the ASPM power regression issue; pcie_aspm=force might work for you (or wait for ubuntu 12.04 which cw the 3.2 kernel containing the fix)