I just bought a used five year old ThinkPad X201 Touch. One of the things I did with Lenovo's [new] upgradesoftware was upgrade the BIOS. Their software also offers fine grained control over lots of other proprietary hardware...e.g. the Watcom digitizer and security chip. It also offers fine grained control over the trackpad and function keys.

And the great thing is that Lenovo is keeping all that stuff current to support an ancient-in-internet years piece of hardware. This isn't HP consumer machine crapware...this is the stuff that costs Lenovo money not something they get paid to pre-install.