Late 2008 Unibody Macbook Pro 2.8 doesn't need this update. It's already running the way that people describe this update to behave.
With an alluminium chassis you shouldn't necessarily put the Macbook on your lap with nothing in between when running CPU/GPU intensive applications. That's what alluminium does, carry away the heat from the inner to the outer. If you don't like that then better buy a plastic computer, plastic isolates from heat.
The chips specs allow a maximum temperature of 105°C. Even after running stress tests for 6.5 hours with a CPU temperature of around 100°C the computer wont crash. The GPU usually stays well below that anyway.
Besides,
the fans are operated by hardware (that's why it says SMC Firmware update) and thus run just the same on Windows as on OS X, at least on my late 2008 Unibody Macbook Pro.
This is to make the computer quiet and nothing to worry about unless it gets too hot for you on the outside. In that case you're better off with using SMCfancontrol or some external cooling solution.
Just to mention it: iStat seems to read the CPU Diode instead of the Core temperatures. This usually is around 10°C higher than what's going on inside of the CPU. I would be better if it showed the CPU Core temperatures of all Cores (at least optionally).
Here is an example of the fans spinning up quite late after when a "sudden" rush of load surprises them after a longer period of only small load. And guess what, if the sudden rush stops suddenly then the CPU temp is down below 70°C in a second and after some more time it's down below 50°C, all with fans only running at 2000 rpm.
So what this update probably really does it make the fans only spin up for prolonged periods of load or for regular load after initially keeping fan-noise down for as long as possible. The CPU can take it, don't worry too much. It may be hot on your hands, but that's a design fault of the chassis (like when the heat gets exhausted/redirected to the upper side when the screen is tilted too much).
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