I've had great luck with T-series ThinkPads. I'm using a T520 as a daily driver at the moment and I've had no real issues with it. I installed it on an E series laptop a while ago and had issues with sound (this was a few versions ago, probably 6.3, and I was just playing around at the time so I never figured out what the problem was).
Mind you I use this mainly for work so my needs are simple, an editor, a browser, a compiler and the like. The default window manager cwm makes for a simple "desktop" for me and the only thing I use at the moment for work that's not from base is mariadb, vim and firefox (plus dependencies of course). So I don't have a lot of splashy graphics to load or anything like that and don't do video or image editing very often. But even if you do need more, the package repository has a huge selection of programs and in my experience they all just work when installed.
On the other hand I put Battle for Wesnoth on it and although that's not really a very graphics intense game it runs great on the laptop.
Overall I really like using it day to day.