They could rescue it easily, but they're muddled up between their (best selling, I presume) consumer (including low-end business) and premium business hardware.
If I was given the job of fixing this at Lenovo, I'd do this:
1. Kill off the ThinkPad brand. It's tainted.
2. Invent a new name for the premium laptops. Something workmanlike, off the top of my head: WorkStead.
3. Tell the world that the premium business laptops are now called WorkStead.
4. Tell the world what makes a WorkStead laptop, guaranteeing those things which have been broken repeatedly over the past few years, e.g. consistent keyboard layout, real buttons for everything.
4. Rebrand the X and T series with this name, but only the ones that deserve it.
5. Wait for people to again start saying 'Get me a fully loaded WorkStead T4xx series' like they used to do with ThinkPads, before they had to say 'Let me check which models they've managed not to ruin recently'.
6. Stop asking people to choose between 3 slightly different Intel wifi cards within $10 of each other in price, defaulting to the worst one, when they're buying a $3000 laptop.
If I was given the job of fixing this at Lenovo, I'd do this:
1. Kill off the ThinkPad brand. It's tainted.
2. Invent a new name for the premium laptops. Something workmanlike, off the top of my head: WorkStead.
3. Tell the world that the premium business laptops are now called WorkStead.
4. Tell the world what makes a WorkStead laptop, guaranteeing those things which have been broken repeatedly over the past few years, e.g. consistent keyboard layout, real buttons for everything.
4. Rebrand the X and T series with this name, but only the ones that deserve it.
5. Wait for people to again start saying 'Get me a fully loaded WorkStead T4xx series' like they used to do with ThinkPads, before they had to say 'Let me check which models they've managed not to ruin recently'.
6. Stop asking people to choose between 3 slightly different Intel wifi cards within $10 of each other in price, defaulting to the worst one, when they're buying a $3000 laptop.
... And other brokenness in the configurators.