The one point where he might got confused is to what is locked and why. I had to recherche that for a Laptop I wanted to fix, and found out that Lenovo is known to lock down the Bios to an absurd degree. My model had an accessible Bios, but you could only change the most basic parameters, like the time. There was some talk about needing to flash another Bios, sadly I found nothing for the specific model I worked with.

But there Linux should've booted, I was trying to change some energy saving settings.

So it might be that this is not a "by contract with Microsoft we locked down the Laptop to only boot Windows", but a "by contract with Microsoft we locked the Bios, which has the side effect of preventing booting Linux because the Kernel does not support yet a specific setting, which will change". Who knows.

It's still a bad policy, and even if it were an accident they have to fix it. They can not be allowed to prevent Linux from booting.

"I don't think being able to change the drive to AHCI mode would fix the problem."

One user Bownairo confirmed that changing the drive to AHCI mode did fix the problem by allowing the drive to be recognized in Linux, after manually flashing a modded BIOS by soldering chip programming hardware:

https://imgur.com/a/ox4Ey

I'll spell it out: a Lenovo representative said "This system has a Signature Edition of Windows 10 Home installed. It is locked per our agreement with Microsoft." This is what people are reacting to.

Now, of course the rep might be mistaken. We need official clarification from someone higher up. But we won't get that until we go off on one and this goes viral.

/r/linux is the most ridiculously paranoid forum I've seen.

You have to go there to see it for yourself. Imagine the way that HN is paranoid of the US government, but then double that and apply it to Microsoft, which makes even less sense. To them, MS is the boogeyman that will stop at nothing to prevent them from being the glorious 1% that doesn't use Windows. It's still the 90's on /r/linux, in many many ways.