I7 laptop overheating issues

Overheating will generally never cause damage - notebooks are programmed to shut down in the event of high temperatures. The reports you read were likely false, or made by unqualified people. If you take care of your machine, it should not overheat.

I can think of numerous cases where the exact opposite happened. In the case of the Dell 12"(i think) laptop with the 8400 GPU. They used the wrong type of thermal conductor for the GPU and after about 3 months the whole motherboard had to be replaced, sometimes on numerous occasions. I used to go through half a dozen Compaq's and HP's where poor thermal management was the main cause of the motherboard having issues.