Ubuntu has been spotty for me. Lots of breaking changes even within releases.

Using openSUSE 12.3 with 3.7.11+ kernel on a Thinkpad T530 (Intel graphics, 9 cell battery) I get 4-12 hours of battery life (depends on usage; coding and work on a dimmer brightness gets me 10-12 hours, watching movies and playing games with the brightness higher up gets me ~4-5 hours).

Newer kernels seem to have regressed as far as power consumption goes, I was trying the 3.10 kernel and getting 2-3 hours of battery life...

You need minimal effort to get these right. Powertop suggested configuration gets my X61t to 6h battery life, whereas windows gets slightly more (about 30min). Heat is not an issue, but fan control is. The correction is just installing thinkfan, for a much quieter laptop.

Really, at least with thinkpads, the just works excuse is just that: an excuse.

Looking forward to my X1 Carbon, already in the mail :-)

Unfortunately I bought into this "thinkpads just work with linux" hype and got a thinkpad - only to discover that the wifi frequently craps out because linux doesn't support well whatever intel wifi thing it comes with, and of late hibernate/suspend is broken too. It really doesn't seem like linux will ever change.

Battery life is excellent. I use the machine on long flights. I just disable wifi when not using it, and close unneeded apps.

No heat issues.

Suspend works perfectly. Takes a few seconds to unsuspend, but that's about it.

Macbooks are much worse supported than thinkpads. For all purposes, thinkpads are the reference platform for linux, like macbooks are for OS X.