Very few laptops are "standard" x86 architecture... and IBM laptops have a lot of custom hardware in them, which isn't too surprising. Though it is increasingly more common for laptops to be more generic under the covers, the large majority of them still require a lot of non-standard things. The chipset is vastly different on all of them - it's not a vanilla BX/i820/whatever (those tend to get rather hot). There isn't intentional breakage, just hardware optimizations given the constraints that a laptop has. Laptops have never been upgradable (save for memory/HD, and those are manufacturer specific - either by interface or physical connecter). Just because it wasn't designed to run BSD (or Linux), and they didn't patch the appropriate parts doesn't mean they "broke" it intentionally.

Just my biased $.02
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