My new laptop that I ordered a while ago finally arrived on Tuesday.
I wasted no time excising Windows Vista Basic that came with it and installed Debian 5.0 (Lenny)
The installation went fine, and the laptop is running well.
I'm running the 2.6.29 kernel from backports.org, because without it the WiFi doesn't work. The in-kernel HDAPS support doesn't seem to work with this kernel, and I'm having some problems building the tp-smapi kernel module, which I haven't looked into too much yet. The fingerprint reader is currently unsupported, so no biometric shenanigans just yet.
The biggest annoyance is that I didn't actually compare the resolution of the display with the resolution of my old laptop (the D610). The display is only 900 pixels high, compared with 1050, so I can't get a 2 x 2 tiling of Gnome Terminal windows at the default font size, which is somewhat irritating, as that's how I'm used to working. Maybe the solution is to start using more virtual desktops. Or use Alt+Tab more. I'm pretty sure the X301 had the same display resolution, so I'm feeling somewhat vindicated in my decision to not spend twice as much money on the X301, as that would have just made me even more annoyed with myself.
The default minimalist X.org configuration file was having X default to using the VESA driver instead of the Intel one. This was producing only a 16-bit colour depth, and resuming from suspending to RAM wouldn't turn the backlight back on. It took me a few days to figure out that the VESA driver was in use, and as soon as I swapped to the Intel driver, the backlight problems went away as well, so that was a win. I haven't bothered to try and get Compiz working yet.
Aside from that, everything's working well. The camera worked out of the box. It resumes from being suspended to RAM ridiculously quickly. The hard drive is super quiet. I've nearly finished moving out of the D610. Oh, and most importantly, it runs so much cooler than the D610.
Because this laptop is now the gruntiest machine in the house, I'm going to stop doing all my package builds on caesar and do them on this laptop instead, so I've set up pbuilder and schroot and whatnot. The CPU has the VMX extensions, so I can have a play with KVM as well.