I think he's talking about the UEFI non-sense that often happens with western manufacturers to lock it to windows (preventing the switching of the signing keys).

I'm not sure how true his thought is in relation to china,but neither here nor there.

I just wanted to point out that the absence of UEFI thing doesn't automatically make a laptop "work well" with Ubuntu, as someone could read from this comment. Ahh, it is edited already.

Are there any x86 laptops sold that are locked down without the ability to enroll user keys?

There is nothing wrong with UEFI. I had a laptop with it that had no keys by default.