From what I gather, this is a badly written Intel BIOS driver that's meant for OEMs to use and Canonical shouldn't have included in the kernel build. Which explains why only Ubuntu is affected (I literally just did a yum update on my Dell laptop before reading this, I gulped - but it's Fedora).
If blame is to be assigned, it's probably shared between Intel and Canonical.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
