If I'm reading the comments right in the bugzilla report linked above, it sounds like Lenovo is going to do the right thing and put out an update BIOS for doing thermal management in the BIOS itself, rather than having the OS control it.  I realize that probably doesn't cover everyone's use cases (or maybe not even older-model Lenovo laptops), but at least for me, this sounds like a more sane approach than trying to guess/reverse engineer what the OS is supposed to tell the hardware.

-Jared