Funny how you ignore the disaster that sits under the hood - if there was ever an example of a company flinging crap against a wall to see which idea sticks it would be Microsoft. Never have I seen such a poorly laid out operating system; files rammed in random locations, registry clogged to the brim with crap, no consistent naming system (why does 32 still exist in filenames that are 64bit?), half finished frameworks, under utilised frameworks (why aren't common controls etc. being drawn in Direct2D/DirectWrite?) and so on.
Please, I've been following Apple for around 10 years, and around 1/2 dozen bugs in the last 10 years is pretty damn good if you ask me when compared to the walking disaster that I've seen when it comes to the PC world - Dell hiding capacitor issues, HP chocking laptops to the brim with desktop hardware that demands you sit in on a perfectly flat surface, Toshiba and the 3 motherboards I went through in 2 months, the Acer laptops where the first component to die is always the hard disk.
For everyone 'Apple horror story' you have, I can point to a heck of a lot more from the PC world - and that isn't even getting the operating system involved. The operating system in the PC world is but a small component when compared to the larger clusterf-ck that is the PC's race to the bottom and cutting costs when ever and where ever possible.
Not to trivialize this issue, but this post makes a good point.
When a Mac release has problems it's news - sometimes even reaching the NY Times and WSJ, and certainly lights up all the enthusiast sites. Especially since Apple computers are the prestige products in the PC world. And is more easily identifiable since Apple only has a few major SKU's in release at any given time (with fewer custom options for most of them than Dell or HP, etc.).
So what's lacking here is a baseline: I'm guessing that many, many Win 7 computers come out with issues - but that few of these make a public ripple at all (unless a laptop catches on fire on a plane, say), given the relative lack of involved communities, media scrutiny and the sheer number of models and configs from all the companies, nearly all of which sell fewer units/SKU.
My guess is that there are frequent instances of "crashgates" on many WinX86 machines, and a much higher percentage than on Apple's releases, but we simply never hear about them - as most of the discussion and drama takes place with tech service reps in cubicles on another continent.
If there's any way to access this info in any systematic way - which I doubt - it would be interesting to compare it to Apple's overall record. It would likely only make Apple look better in context and provide a dossier to throw in troll faces when they take glee with a Mac glitch.
Still, I recall enough Mac roll out problems, from niggling and infrequent to fairly significant (like this one) and quite wide-spread (and this seems more wide-spread than most by an order of magnitude) to never buy a new Mac model until at least two-three months after release - especially when it's a whole new processor family and first use of new graphics hardware.
My sense is further that Apple reacts with limited comment and is somewhat slow to acknowledge problems until they've really digested the problems and are ready - or nearly ready - with a fix.
And unless someone can correct me, I don't recall any instances where there were any significant remaining problems with any model more than 3-4 months into its release cycle. Cracking in Cube cases might the one exception that comes to mind.
So I imagine there's a team pounding hard away on this and that a software, firmware or (worst case) hardware/recall fix will be forthcoming in fairly short order.