I've been following the Something Awful thread on thermal grease and the Macbook Pro CPU temperatures. I installed the speedit kernel extension and Temperature Monitor, which reads the data from the kext and graphs it.

My CPU seems to be floating around 63° C (145° F) when the machine is mostly idle. When running Handbrake, which does a pretty good job of banging both CPUs at 100%, the temperature rises as high as 78° C (172° F). The graph here shows the CPU temp during the handbrake run, and after.



I seem to be doing better than the guy who's getting 97° C at load! The Macbook doesn't seem any hotter than my 17" 1GHz G4 Powerbook was.