This has been my experience as well, with a fairly wide variety of nixes/bsds/etc and a half a dozen different machines.

Now I just disable it completely and tell it to shut down when I close the lid, and wait like 15s. If the fans and lights don't stop "soon", I know it's having problems turning off. It's much better than the random freezes, or boiling alive in a backpack before draining all battery power.