Comment 57 for bug 810093

Most of the changes in the patch you attached are already applied to oneiric (although not yet released). We're going to want to take the versions that are in mainline Linux instead of that one for several reasons -- first, it makes backporting future upstream bug fixes simpler; second, the upstream version is likely to have wider testing; and third, it keeps things consistent with how future versions of Ubuntu will behave (since we'll get the upstream fixes by default when we move forward kernel versions).

The difference between yours and the upstream fix is essentially that yours avoids the quirk detection by applying the quirk to all machines. This changes the way things are done for machines that already work, and while it seems like it shouldn't cause problems on those machines it does introduce some risk of regression. For stable updates minimizing the risk of regression is key, so that's another reason to use the upstream fix.

It sounds like the two patches do fix your backlight issues, even if there is the annoyance of changing the backlight level when the module is loaded. I'll work on getting them applied for a future oneiric update. Thanks!