My experience with hibernation/resume.

I've had virtually NO problem with sleep and hibernation on my Lenovo laptops in the last 10 years, on Win XP (which actually had very few rare issues originally (R40, see below), solved after some Windows Update released soon after I started using it), Windows Vista, Windows 7 (and Windows 8 now). These were IBM/Lenovo R42, R50E, R52, T60, T61, X200, EDGE. I've used, but not daily as my main machine, more recent T410 and T420. Still no problem.
Fairly different hardware, but all IBM/Lenovo. They've all been my main daily work (+ extensive usage at home) machines.

I had instead very frequent issues with two Dells I used in the same timespan (both Latitude, but can't remember now what model exactly), the problems always consisting in something going wrong after resume.

I ALWAYS had problems with Windows 2000 on a huge and heavy Dell laptop, back in the day. Hibernation and sleep unusable.


Edit:
Incidentally, my current main Lenovo X200 has an Intel SSD+Windws 8 and boot/shutdown times are so quick I simply disabled Hibernation completely. I still put the laptop to sleep occasionally, when I want to resume what I was doing and for some reason can't leave the laptop just on. In terms of start speed, virtually no difference with sleep. Fast boot is indeed a very appreciated (and very well implemented) feature in daily usage. Windows 7 on this X200 (Core 2 Duo P8600, 4GB Ram) has always been fast in standard daily usage, but in this respect Windows 8 is impressive. This is possibly the first time that I can't imagine any performance increase benefit in spite of working on a two year old machine. I'd be happy with a better display, a multi-touch touchpad (or, even better for a track-point guy like me, a touch display + track-point), maybe larger HDD (my SSD is a small 8GB), a USB3 or eSATA port, an HDMI output. But not speed in daily usage even with average/high workload.