I think you are missing that the 'you' in that argument is Lenovo, not the consumer. Lenovo doesn't have an interest in how people's use of a device changes, u

I think you are missing that the 'you' in that argument is Lenovo, not the consumer. Lenovo doesn't have an interest in how people's use of a device changes, unless it changes they up front purchasing decision. They do have a very strong interest in making sure that reviews and writeups don't say that the battery life is rubbish because the laptop has been switched to AHCI mode. As such, they have a strong incentive to prevent this happening. Given that the operating which 99.9% of their install base will use supports this, it's almost certainly a net win. They don't support running Linux on it - that's at the customers risk. Why would they devote any resource to this?