But for spinlocks, sleep is a disaster, as the lock stays set. Other threads will spin when they hit it, and they won't stop spinning until you wake up from the sleep. That could be an eternity compared to the handful of spins expected in the worst case at a spinlock, because spinlocks exist just to synchronize access to memory locations, they aren't supposed to interact with the context-switching mechanism.
(For that matter, every other thread might eventually hit the spinlock and then you would have wedged every thread of every core of the entire system.)
