That response sounds a little too "f. you" from a guy said to be a customer-focused perfectionist. Not saying the OP is lying -- could be an out-of-character pseudo-Steve, or the genuine article having an off day.
Or, possibly, it could have been intentionally "a little too f. you." Single-pixel defects are a little bit unavoidable in the large scale, but they aren't the plague some people claim. I myself have never gotten one on any LCD from any manufacturer. Remembering that Apple's quality control would closely examine a random sample of outgoing units and every unit returned as defective, you can kind of know based on QC reports what kind of customer defect experience is plausible and what kind isn't. You can't know for sure that any particular customer isn't just spectacularly unlucky, but you can know that in general certain kinds of very dramatic complaints tend not to be entirely accurate. You also know that every time a customer returns a product, it costs the company money. A customer who returns ten iPods may eat up more than the profit margin on the eleventh he chooses to keep.
There is a calculus to this sort of thing. For verified reports of real defects, you want to minimize the defects, because returns cost money and that's within your control. For reports of imaginary defects, or "defects" that would not trouble the typical customer, you're better off not trying to retain the customer, because the cost of returns is the same, but you can't fix the problem internally. For spectacularly unlucky customers, they still cost the company money, but as long as you've done a good enough job of minimizing the real defects, such unlucky customers are rare enough that losing them doesn't hurt the business, even accounting for internet word-of-mouth. Therefore, speaking purely logically (as opposed to sympathetically), unless you've verified a genuine QC problem, it is not unreasonable to treat every customer with a complaint sufficiently outside reasonable expectations as if he's the sort of customer you're better off without.
I want to stress that I am absolutely not questioning the OP's story. The "spectacularly unlucky" group will always be nontrivial in size, and they're more likely to post about their experiences than happy customers are. I'm just suggesting the sort of train of thought that might lead to a response I still think was overly brusque, even for Steve.
