Overall Winner
In our little just-for-fun comparison, we the judges find that Mandriva wins by 4 categories to 2. But to the original question the answer would be to go buy the Mandriva Power Pack or try PCLOS or ALT Linux in which advanced power saving feature do work out of the box. Also, YMMV.
However, don't forget that both openSUSE and Mandriva are both nice distros. This little article is highly subjective and you may not agree. That's okay. I love them both.
Winner: Mandriva 2008.0
For the record, I never got the impression that Susan was prejudiced against Novell. In fact, she has always seemed like a long-time SUSE user (when not distro hopping). Her comparison confirms the fact that OpenSUSE is not essential for desktop Linux to reach the masses. We could do better even with Mandriva, which explicitly rejected and eliminated the possibility of selling out to an abusive monopoly.