I finally had an opportunity to reload the Inspiron 600m with Fedora Core 2. I am pleasantly surprised by what many people said was a horrible release, but it seems that this is a case of a few bad features spoiling the distribution. Yes, I actually like the new Nautilus. So far.
ACPI works out of the box on Core 2. It even has this nice new daemon, cpuspeed, which will manage the throttling of the processor. So far this seems to really help battery life. Wireless did not work from the initial install, but then I didn't really expect it to. Installing the ipw2100 module was simple once I had the kernel source installed. Installing the kernel source was a pain, though, because the mirrors were out of sync. The ipw2100 driver does work for this laptop, and now I don't have to use my Lucent PCMCIA card.
Now that all of the features of this laptop work, I think it's time to start looking for a new one...