Out of curiosity I reinstalled Snow Leopard on my LVDS rig and interestingly I found out that I also have the ring stall issue on Snow! Now it doesn't happen very often, so I didn't notice it before, but one look in the log made it all clear.
I also think that ring stall is connected with artifacts on HD3000, as every time it happens I get artifacts on my screen in SL, Lion and ML.
I have no idea how to fix that for LVDS rigs. I've seen someone get results with using EDID, maybe I'll try that.
EDIT:
Another interesting thing: apparently on Lion HDMI connection doesn't work, when using MacBookPro8,3 smbios. With 8,1 it works fine, haven't check 8,2 yet.