I was able to install the system with the standard stretch (9.1.0) installer (DVD ISO on a USB stick)
The wired ethernet worked without adding any non-free firmware packages. For wifi I needed to add firmware-iwlwifi from non-free.
When installing grub to the EFI System Partition, the hack for installing to the removable media path was not necessary.
The ?T460s page mentions problems with the stretch kernel, HDMI, suspend and trackpoint. I'm running the stretch-backports kernel 4.11.6-1~bpo9+1 and these problems were not observed on my T470s, I've tested all hardware except the SD card reader and Smartcard reader and everything appears to be fine.
The Lenovo Thinkpad Thunderbolt 3 dock is troublesome:
- monitor and charging work consistently
- to make ethernet and USB ports work whenever you dock, it is necessary to
- go in the BIOS Thunderbolt settings page and enable these things in Pre-boot
- use kernel version 4.13 or later (available in stretch-backports)
install thunderbolt-tools and add your dock to the ACL
- if you don't have kernel 4.13 and thunderbolt-tools but you connect the dock before booting the laptop it will also work for you but this is not practical for undocking and docking without rebooting
- some other web sites suggest disabling the Thunderbolt 3 security, but then you run the risk that any attacker who has access to your laptop for 5 minutes can plug a device into the Thunderbolt 3 port and get a memory dump, including any encryption keys or passwords in RAM