System unusable on battery after incomplete shutdown

As still happens reasonably often with Ubuntu, when my laptop locks up and I am forced to power-cycle it, the system (by default) comes back in an unusable state:

1. It skips fsck on startup because I'm on battery.
2. My root filesystem (JFS) is apparently detected as not having been cleanly unmounted, so the system mounts it read-only
3. Naturally, X refuses to start, but worse
4. I can't even log in at a virtual terminal to fix things because... the filesystem is read-only.

The only fix is to boot up in single-user mode, drop to a root shell prompt, do

 #mount -o remount,rw /
 # fsck /

Then I can resume the normal boot process.

Apparently according to https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/e2fsprogs/+bug/89752 a lot of people thought that skipping fsck when not on AC power was a wonderful idea, but it is the beginning of a perfect storm of hassle on my system. The fsck, once I manage to get to a root shell, only takes a couple seconds, and it would be infinitely better for me if that were done automatically regardless of A/C power state. I don't know why people use ext3 on laptops anyway; it takes forever to fsck (http://www.sabi.co.uk/Notes/linuxFS.html#fsFeats).

So there are two serious problems here:

1. fsck is skipped
2. can't login if the root FS is mounted read-only

and a couple suggestions:

3. Ubuntu should probably not install ext3 by default on laptops :-)
4. The installer should probably partition the disk by default so that whatever part of the disk that needs to be writable for login is probably writable even in case of an unclean shutdown.

This is ubuntu 8.10