Mine's already off, but then again so is the bluetooth since I rarely use it. It took me a while to find that preference pane (the path btw is Syspref>Bluetooth>Advanced) only to find that option grayed out.
That's not good to hear about a notebook baking itself to death. I agree with what he says about this setting should be of by default, it makes sense with a desktop but laptops are really easy to wake up.