Received mine yesterday. Promptly took a backup of the Windows 8.1 load and blew it all away for 7. Only weird issues I had with the trackpoint--besides the left and right buttons being hinged the other way now--is that the trackpoint felt like it was difficult to move to the right of the screen, but extremely sensitive when moving to the left. This resolved itself, however, when I pulled the nub out and reseated it.
The trackpoint buttons themselves have a very satisfying action to them: better than the original X1 Carbon (with the xx30-style buttons,) and probably as good as the X220 that I've been using up until now--time will tell. They're certainly better than any other trackpoint button I've tried that is hinged this way (I'm looking at you, HP) mostly because they kept the general shapes of the buttons correct: big left and right, small middle.
They keyboard keys are very great. The layout, obviously, not so much, compared to a classic 7-row. But at this point, we've lost that battle. At least it doesn't have any stupid touch-strip gimmicks. The need to keep Fn-lock on all the time to use my F-keys proper feels annoying--the fact that the laptop function-key (brightness, volume, etc.) is printed larger than the F# key lets you know who they're marketing to. But at least there are still spaces between groups of F# keys, versus the not-so-spaced-out xx30 keyboards (X230, etc.)
Other typical annoyances I've had with late-model ThinkPads, such as fan whine, seem to be gone. The fan only produces a fwoosh, not a whine. Hard to explain, but I really, really hate high-pitched whiny fans. Apple machines have never had this problem, but Lenovo machines circa 2011-2014 all seemed to exhibit this. Finally the horrible trend has been stayed.
Performance seems to be good for a machine this size (thickness, that is.) I opted for the i7 (and managed to get the 8GB RAM upgrade for free--normally $100--by phone-ordering when the online pricing was broken when the machine first went up; the i7 option bumped the price by around $550, which was wrong from the $270 it said listed, plus $100 for the RAM.) I would have preferred the GT3 graphics (HD 6000) obviously, as this HD 5500 seems to perform at best almost to the point of HD 5000 compared to the i7 4650 model of last year, and the MacBook Airs. Sure, you can argue that with a 15 watt TDP design, you never actually get the full benefit of 48-core HD 6000 versus 24-core HD 5500, but benchmarks will probably show soon enough. And of course, being limited to 8GB of RAM is obnoxious, given that Apple was offering the MacBook Pro in 2012 with 16GB soldered-on.
Other issues of note: backlight bleed on the WQHD non-touch panel, but I've grown used to it from other machines so at this point it doesn't kill it for me. It does not seem to exhibit the horrible LG symptoms seen in the FHD IPS panel in the T440s (versus the panel lottery players from AUO or Samsung, or only one of the two--forgot which.) Mine, also, appears to be plenty bright. I don't think I will ever use it at maximum brightness--one or two notches from max is already blinding for me. Also, as Windows 7's DPI scaling stuff is generally suck, I'm running it at 1600x900, which is producing very good-looking results, so long as I don't stare at the screen from 6 inches away...
Finally, it is annoying that the machine cannot be powered on with Fingerprint, but I guess this is something that they lost when they switched fingerprint reader providers a few years back. At least you can swipe once to unlock your hard drive password, and then have it authenticate through to Windows.
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Problems? See this thread at archive.org.
