Implications of 'acpi=off' for a laptop RHEL 6 install?

This question is an offshoot of [1]. In summary: brand new laptop [2], purpose is a RHEL 6 mobile development workstation. Using 6.4 install media Anaconda hung on 'Waiting for hardware to initialize'. I was however able to get past this by adding 'acpi=off' to the kernel boot options, which ends up persisting in grub.conf.

I now have everything working - wired and wireless networking, sound, USB, graphics etc. The only issue I can see so far is that Power Management is disabled - so I have no idea as to battery life. That's OK, unless it's a symptom of other issues as yet waiting to be discovered - like cooling system disabled, which I may not notice now, but might surface later in an unpleasant way.

So the question to the community is: has anybody run into this issue before, and have any advice as to how sensible it is to proceed with acpi=off?

[1] (https://access.redhat.com/site/discussions/539573)
[2] (http://www.toshiba.com/us/computers/laptops/qosmio/X70/X75-A7290)