The crash you saw was in nouveau, which is the open source nvidia driver, and something I would absolutely expect. You didn’t have the binary nvidia driver active. This was not a hardware problem, not a Lenovo problem, not an Ubuntu problem. It was simply that the driver wasn’t installed and enabled correctly yet.
I concur with @eeickmeyer - while it’s frustrating for you to have a system that isn’t working, it’s also frustrating for me to see an issue that could very easily be solved without a ‘nuke and pave’. 