One neat thing about the lattepanda is it has an atmega32u4 sitting on-board and attached to the main cpu via usb serial. You can fire up arduino, choose leonardo and ttyACM0, and send sketches to it. With the multiple arduino headers, you could code a simple project to monitor temps and start a fan, or watch power capacity of a battery and cleanly shutdown the main system. You could even have it send HID events to the main OS. I imagine you could really get creative. All laptops should have a powerful arduino co-processor with accessible GPIO.