That's bad luck for the 1 year and 1 day...
That being said, HDD failure is a pretty common occurrence for laptops, and providing you have backups, I wouldn't call that 'died'.
And of course, anecdotal evidence... I Mean, it seems that Apple stuff, statistically, tend to last substantially more than competitors' and therefore have a quite nice resale value.
"I wouldn't call that "dead"*
But anyway, you had a bad hard drive, it happens. I'm sure if he would have asked Apple they would have replaced it; given that people speak so highly of their service, and the fact that it was only 1 day out.