Joe-- Is your answer an official reply from Intel? Are you an Intel employee?
I think there is more to it than whether the SSD performs hardware encryption. The Samsung 840 line had a recent firmware upgrade that allowed the hardware encryption to be controlled by BitLocker. Prior to this upgrade, the Samsung SSDs were not compatible with BitLocker hardware encryption.
The SSD needs to pass the encryption key back and forth from the TPM chip for BitLocker to use intrinsic hardware encryption instead of BitLocker's usual software encryption.
