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.
I have the feeling that the "legendary thinkpad serviceability" means two things: the document that you cite is publicly available and that customer disassembling the whole thing and replacing one subassembly is supported way of solving warranty claims.
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).
For most business line notebooks the maintenance guide is publicly available and you don't have to remove the speakers and lcd screen to access the fan assembly (serious, wtf?). Thinkpad serviceability is overrated, it's certainly not "legendary", even if you can consider it decent.
