As counterpoint for the repairability I never liked how hard it is to access the fan assembly on thinkpads. You basically have to fully take the laptop apart to access it. And for the laptops from a decade ago I typically wanted to clean the fan assembly properly every year around springtime.
For example for the X220 the fan assembly is removed after the system board, no way around. Before the system board can be replaced, the following components need to be removed:
• “1010 Battery pack” on page 63
• “1020 Hard disk drive (HDD) and solid state drive (SSD)” on page 63
• “1030 DIMM” on page 65
• “1040 Keyboard” on page 67
• “1050 Palm rest or palm rest with a fingerprint reader” on page 69
• “1070 Backup battery” on page 73
• “1060 PCI Express Mini Card for wireless LAN/WiMAX” on page 71
• “1080 PCI Express Mini Card for wireless WAN” on page 74
• “1090 Keyboard bezel” on page 76
• “1100 LCD assembly” on page 77
• “1110 Base cover assembly and speaker assembly” on page 80
T220 is not better in this regard either.
There are other decade old laptops with similar quality service manuals that don't have this issue and the fan assembly can be removed without too much hassle.