Dell has apologized for the actions of a salesman who was dissing Lenovo to boost sales (attempting deter US customers from buying from the company by pointing out its connections to the Communist Party). The Red Herring has a nice item on the case.

Bingfing has an update, which notes that some online comments have reported that Dell salesmen were using similar tactics in China:

…although it’s pretty sure that is not an official policy from dell, commentators and chinese customers who have purchased dell’s systems confirmed that dell sales persons used the same trick in their sales pitch before, like "why you consider a japanese system instead of an american one, you guys don’t like japanese, do you?"

This doesn’t surprise me. Perhaps Toshiba can use the Dell-Lenovo incident to regain some market share ion the laptop market

Perhaps adding fuel to the fire, Inquirer.net notes that Dell may be using other dirty tactics against Lenovo… hoarding chip supplies

The tale from Lenovo is that Dell seems to have acquired all the 1.7
GHz and 1.8 GHz Pentium M parts from Intel for the next 14 days or so.
The question in my mind is Intel just mad that IBM released their Opteron blades and found out that Lenovo is almost ready to ship an AMD based Thinkbook?