It probably comes down to which version is bigger (you probably also want to try uninlining.)
Thanks for the heads up (also saw the SMBIOS update to this) but those don't seem to be a problem in fact. David Reed has been running with the simple udelay(2) version of this and reported no more hangs. He moreover reported no trouble after booting with "acpi=off" meaning that things seem to be fine pre-acpi which the boot code (and this io_delay_init) is. So I believe we get to ignore those.
Okay, so there is something inside ACPI which tickles this. Which brings further credibility that it's activating a debugging hack, probably inside the SuperIO/system controller chip.
It would be interesting to know exactly which part of ACPI triggers this. I bet it is a reference to system controller namespace.