Sleep has never been a problem for me on any Thinkpad with Ubuntu. Debian, on the other hand, was nothing like pain for bluetooth, wifi, suspend. And don't get me started about the UMTS dongle I once bought that was useless under Debian but worked out of the box (even with a wizard) on Ubuntu. Then again, that dongle never really worked under Windows either (the drivers it auto-installed caused blue screens, and when they didn't, the abominably ugly software that came with it, never found the dongle).