[Dire]

I'm also in the camp of knowing exactly one person of about 20 who's had a problem. Anecdotal evidence and all, but something has always stood out - the majority of people never have a problem, but then there are these people that go through like 3+ consoles in a short period of time. Can't help but assume there's some user level environmental influence of some sort, but at the same time I doubt somebody's going to be dumb enough block ventilation, keep it in a high temperature area or whatever after they fry multiple consoles doing so.

And there's no real way of measuring failure rates. Online surveys will not only suffer from obvious response biasis of legitimate responses, but also simply false responses due to the fanboyesque nature of the topic. And Microsoft is unlikely to ever give a nonrelative (eg - 'less than', etc..) response.

From a gaming perspective, it's pretty much a nonissue. But I think it's extremely interesting from a business perspective in it's impact and how MS has handled it. I'm not really sure if they've been succesful or not.