I have an lm_sensors based thermal plugin running in the development panel. You are able to select the sensor you want to monitor. Because it is lm_sensors based, it is as good as the hardware drivers. (The coretemp driver is a little behind the latest Intel chips.)
The answer for why the temperature looks like 22000 is that the hardware reports it in thousandths of a degree. This is another reason why you want to be lm_sensors based; the accumulated base of knowledge about what units each sensor reports is in sensors.conf.
There is no committed release date at this time for the next feature release panel that I have been working on. It is, as yet, too unfinished and unstable for anyone else to be running. For now, conky or gkrellm are a way to see these sensors, if you wish to use the desktop space.