Connell:
You can check yourself. If you don't see any crashes with the nv driver when powernowd is running then the odds are there is a problem with the nvidia binary driver. I have seen a range of laptops/desktops with i915 cards running GL programs which do not suffer this problem (and are definitely doing scaling) but that's not to say that there aren't other graphics drivers which have not been tested in a variable CPU frequency scaling environment and thus cause lockups...
Connell:
You can check yourself. If you don't see any crashes with the nv driver when powernowd is running then the odds are there is a problem with the nvidia binary driver. I have seen a range of laptops/desktops with i915 cards running GL programs which do not suffer this problem (and are definitely doing scaling) but that's not to say that there aren't other graphics drivers which have not been tested in a variable CPU frequency scaling environment and thus cause lockups...