I think it's ridiculous how much Apple has let their own quality control slide in the past couple years. There's been at least one major product defect every year - first the iBook logic boards, then the pink 23" Cinema displays, and now the lower RAM slots in the PowerBooks. They also had those PowerBook battery recalls.
Sadly, I doubt you'll find anything much better on the PC side of things without paying out the nose for something like a
VoodooPC. You can obviously build your own desktop computer and ensure that all the parts you buy are top-quality, with long warranties, but you can't really make your own notebook. I think it's a damn shame that anyone should have to pay so much for a notebook just to get what has always been thought of as a basic feature - dependability.
A lot of people probably would be willing to spend extra for a better-built product. But a lot of people would not, and therefore companies (even Apple) must cater to the bottom line. It's too bad.
What really pisses me off (and pisses off many people) is that despite all this crap, they go on denying any problems and refuse to fix what are obvious design flaws. I could even see them doing that if they would at least fix the problem silently, but they don't even do that! It looks as though they're still churning out defective motherboards. So not only will they not acknowledge it publicly, they won't even admit it to themselves!