Markus Pfeiffer has made it possible to control your laptop’s backlight using ACPI – if you have a i915 chipset and DragonFly. xbacklight does not work, but setting hw.acpi.video.lcd0.brightness does.
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I remember that I had some trouble on my 13 in MacBook White 2007 mid when they moved the backlight driver into the Intel graphics and thus making the Apple backlight module useless, it did not remember the last state of backlight and resumed from suspend or even from screensaver monitor off with 0% backlight. This was especially a problem when your session was locked and you had to type in the password w/o seeing where you are typing it in. This is always a problem when there are more applications trying to (re)set the same property. It is far better having the driver to take care of it and the applications (like Xorg) only sending messages to the driver how they expect the state to be. So the logic should be inside the userspace application, but not the control how it is been done.