I'm really skeptical about Lenovo because of the proprietary software issues they've had, even read things about bioses with sketchy stuff in them which couldn't be flashed and such.
The consumer line is shit. It's branded just "Lenovo", but Lenovo themselves call it "IdeaPad".
The enterprise line is good. It's branded "ThinkPad", or "Lenovo ThinkPad", and every unit in this line is bound to have the label "ThinkPad" on its body prominently displayed. The two series of laptops your parent referred to are both ThinkPad series.
And the sketchy stuff you refer to all happened in the IdeaPad line, no ThinkPads were affected. Lenovo has historically run the ThinkPad division separately with some autonomy granted.