So I finally got around to trying this again.

After pulling many, many teeth, I finally have a working package in a working PPA!

I call this fork of indicator-cpufreq "indicator-powersave". In fact, it no longer depends on cpufreq; but uses sysfs to control various power consumption options. It is not an automated daemon like tlp, but a user-discretion utility.

It has a backend bash script, /usr/bin/throttle, which can be used independently on the command line.