reinstalling on a thinkpad

I'm thinking of reinstalling vista on my lenovo t61 along with a partition or unbuntu. My computer seems to have quite a bit of bloatware on it. A few of the lenovo programs I find very usefull so I don't want to lose them all. How easy is it to wipe the hard drive and then install all the drivers/software from lenovo? Well, to be clearer, are all the programs that are important downloadable from lenovo's website? Is it possible to use the fingerprint reader, the intel wireless card 4965AGN, and the webcam with ubuntu? Are there drivers out there that will let me use those?

bump...does anyone know if you can get the fingerprint reader/webcam to work with unbuntu?