Semi-hijacking your question to mention the other side of the pond too, which many people do not seem to know about and I run into this issue quite regularly.

While the laptop situation is indeed pretty bad (the X200 is probably as best as you can get here), for people looking for a modern workstation, AMD's current FX processor lineup is still free from this trash. Past the 2013 designs (Family 16h [1]) AMD includes their own equivalent of Intel's ME called PSP [2], so presumably the upcoming Zen is going to be heavily backdoored too.

Now, you can still buy an 8-core/4 GHz+ AMD Vishera [3] generation (which is the "current" FX), add a motherboard with ECC support (in a stark contrast to Intel, all AMD FX processors fully support ECC memory and for example ASUS sells a number of AMD motherboards with ECC support) and build yourself a workstation that will easily last for another decade, possibly longer (you can always buy a motherboard or two of your favourite model as a backup for the times when they finally disappear from the market). All FX processors are factory unlocked [4] and can be pushed much farther past their design specs with decent cooling, adding another bit to their possible usefulness over the long term.

Some more (random) reading on the subject of avoiding AMD PSP and Intel ME:

http://hollaforums.com/thread/557954/technology/uncorrectabl...

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[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_CPU_microarchitect...

[2] - https://libreboot.org/faq/#amd

[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_FX_microprocessors...

[4] - http://www.techpowerup.com/153445/amd-unlocked-fx-processors...

Depends what you mean by "laptop". According to [1], the fastest processor that shipped with an X200 is the Intel T9600. Checking Geekbench, today's top-of-the-line 64-bit ARM phablets seem to have significantly higher CPU performance (both single and multi-core), and an equal amount of RAM. AFAIK, those devices don't have anything like Intel ME; they do typically have a hypervisor running above the Linux kernel, but it should be possible to replace it if the bootloader is unlocked. I think.

If someone comes out with an ARM64 Chromebook in the near future, that might be a good device to target for fully-free system efforts.

[1] https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/documents/migr-73156

Yep, nothing past 2008 will be supported.

Which means that while this is nice and all, I got crap to be doing.

It already takes Visual Studio 3 hours to "repair" itself once a month when it stops working, and that's on a machine that would have been a supercomputer in 2008.