It's not crap. I have just such a partition on my Dell laptop and it's very useful. If you just shut the lid it suspends to RAM, which is OK for a day or two. If you suspend to disk, or you leave the suspend to RAM suspended too long, it'll dump the entire contents of memory to the disk partition. This takes longer to save and restore (a couple of minutes on my 512MB machine) but it makes the suspend "permanent".
It's really useful!
Most interesting. Do you have a pointer to documentation for setting up such a partition?
Um, no. :( I had a look around the web and found information like this: http://empl.home.cern.ch/empl/inspiron.html but it mentions using a utility to create the partition. I'm pretty sure I didn't do anything other use fdisk to make a suitably sized partition, then set the partition type to "IBM Thinkpad hibernation".