I fought a similar system on a server board once, and actually got a system to install treating it as a RAID 0 with a single disk. It did not boot properly though. Since these are notebook systems with a single disk anyway, is that what they are treating the system as? (i.e. RAID 0 with a single disk) Is there any way to update GRUB to boot off of such a thing?

All that said, I think Intel absolutely should be held responsible, they certainly push themselves as a Linux friendly company, and disk controllers should be a basic device I should always be able to access.