Just to balance things out ... 🙂
I only ever bought one thing refurbished (a 23" ACD), and it was the *worst* experience.
The product (remember this is over a thousand bucks worth of monitor), arrived in a partially crushed old cardboard box with loose blocks of foam inside, it was missing some trivial things (manuals, stickers, etc.), was a bit scratched on the back and absolutely filthy with dust and smears all over. It also had a dead pixel. This is no exaggeration either, I took un-boxing pictures to prove it and sent them along to Apple at the time.
So all that stuff on the web site about how the QA people "check the refurbished stuff even more than the original stuff" (paraphrased), is definitely not true. The clear implication they also give that the product will be repacked in the original packing materials is also quite false.
Worst of all, Apple refused to even let me complain unless I did it by telephone only. Since that wasn't an option for me at the time they basically did nothing at all and didn't want to hear from me about the problems (which I only skimmed over here) I had by email or snail mail.
I actually felt kind of cheated.
Never again. 🙁