That is because you are using an ATI card. I have a geforce on my desktop that 'just works'. I can play TF2, SupCom, Civ4 at 1080p full details ( well, minus a few shaders and such ) , online multi-player without any kind of problems.
On the other hand, the Trinity laptop can barely play TF2 with inferior image quality, SupCom has horrible artefacts and Civ4 crashes randomly.
Yes, I did select 'use only APU' from Catalyst ( or something like that ) and the temperature does drop significantly, but it is a far cry from windows where, after hours of browsing and 1080p movies, heat is barely noticeable. I don't think the all the APU thermal throttling and power-saving features are used in the 2.6 and 3.2 kernels that I used.
I doubth more people work on porting Catalyst to linux then there are working on the redeon driver. If I was to dream though they would port the radeon driver to Mac and Win and things would start to help. But that woun't happen before it reaches paraity and all parts of the specs are opened up.
Blobs deliver nothing, as always.
Nothing to see here, move along.