In the light of recent knowledge, it makes me wonder whether IBM had NSA backdoors, too.
My previous work computer was a Thinkpad (2011 model) with a fingerprint swipe-scanner, but it was flaky, wasn't baked into the OS, and didn't have any killer apps that supported it.
If, for example, Lenovo released something like 1Password but tied into the FP scanner for auth, that would've been really good… but that would require work to ensure it was secure and that particular sensor's flakiness would've killed the execution anyway.
I'm guessing it was there for military/secured installations where some bespoke software would interface with the scanner for a customer-specific purpose.