I would rather buy a new HP Elitebook or Dell Latitude than anything from Lenovo at this point.
But yes, they support Windows well enough.
There's also the whole Superfish incident, injecting malware to the OS from the BIOS is scary- and while it did not affect the Thinkpad line specifically I am increasingly wary of the company because of it.
And since the hardware is so hard to service these days, and (soldered components, plastic clips) and it isn't very special either there's not enough "appeal" to suade my opinion in their favour.
iFixit regularly rate those devices 10: https://www.ifixit.com/laptop-repairability
1170 Fan assembly
For access, remove these FRUs in order:
* “1010 Battery pack” on page 67
* “1020 ExpressCard blank bezel” on page 68
* “1050 DIMM slot cover” on page 73
* “1070 PCI Express Mini Card for wireless WAN” on page 75
* “1080 Keyboard” on page 77
* “1110 PCI Express Mini Card for wireless LAN” on page 85
* “1120 Keyboard bezel assembly, FPC cable, and Bluethooth daughter card” on page 87
* “1150 Speaker assembly” on page 95
* “1160 LCD unit” on page 97
And by the way, the "good thinkpad" series (ie. letter + two numbers) were both made and designed by Acer/Wistron and significantly mechanically simpler than the previous IBM designed thinkpads (eg. if you disassemble "low-cost" 600E, you end up with ~10 random-ish machined aluminium brackets and how to disassemble the thing is highly non-obvious).