Graceful like closing a laptop and putting it in a backpack only to have windows refuse to shutdown and become a heater until it cooks the battery and ruins the screen....

Isn't that more of a PEBCAK?

It absolutely isn't. If a laptop lid is closed, it needs to be sleeping, period. No random updates, no search indexing. I've also had this happen after explicitly putting laptops into sleep AND closing the lid. No idea how Apple is the only company able to do this consistently.

This absolutely can and does happen on Apple hardware

I haven't used a mac for over a decade, but for the decade or so before that it never happened to me once, either on an iBook or MBP. Perhaps something changed in the meantime.

Apple laptops are typically extremely good when it comes to sleep and suspend.

A major advantage of having a very small range of hardware you have to support is that it's pretty easy to test all possible combinations and make sure they work well together. As far as I'm concerned, Apple has been, and probably always will be the undisputed champion of doing this right.

As a long time user of BSD laptops (apple) I've never had one surprise me when the screen was closed. FWIW I never buy these bsd laptops, they are given to me by $current.employer for work.