Be my guest !
Early adopters are always subject to this, in the past WHQL was a reference to good, reliable and bug free drivers, As we can see, this isn't the case anymore.
We shouldn't worry, Intel is known for providing good drivers (at least their Ethernet drivers are very good), We'll probably receive a statement from Intel in this thread or in Intel RST "Known Compatibility Issues" section. So I'd keep an eye in both areas.
At least for know the only thing we can do is be patient and wait for a new driver, test and report if the issue* is gone.
*As I said, We need an official statement to know if the new APM behavior is a feature implemented of RST 13 Series Drivers or if it's an issue. Personally, I would give the user the option to enable this or not, It can be very useful to save power (specially on mobile devices with more than one disk), I see a lot of Ultrabooks today with a small SSD for OS and a secondary larger HDD storage, but as already said in this topic, it can wear out your disk faster.
Personally I had one load-unload cycle each 10 seconds, this is enough to reach the life span of the drive (according to the manufacturer specifications) in 7 months with 10 hours of daily use. As the drive have at least 1 year of warranty we can assume that this behavior is not normal.