I wasn't comparing anything, all I did was prove the hardware was functional by
trying it under Windoze. Ubuntu is intercepting the key controls correctly,
just that the setting isn't making it to hardware. Guessing that could be a
pretty simple fix. First thing that came to mind is that perhaps a proprietary
driver was required but being just a stoopid user I don't know where I would
even look for a driver to install it.

In any event, if this is the worst incompatibility I'll encounter, I won't
complain too much about it. I really like Unity over Gnome. It's a fairly new
laptop model, so maybe the backlight control issue will get resolved with a
future update. I may try a few other live CD distributions and see if there's
any difference.