Madskillz: so would you say it's likely that the PS2 DRE errors are much less common than the 360 RROD? I think most people would agree with that.
You have to realize with failure rates you typically look at stuff over the expected age of the product. So for the 360, you might look at failure rates over the first 5 years of its life, since it is expected to last five years. If the failure rate is more than, say, 5%, that's outside of the normal range for electronics. A 3% failure rate would be close to normal for the lifetime of a product.
That said, it's worth mentioning that I dug throught the Somethingawful "My 360 borked" thread a bit more, and noticed some failures from Xbox 360s purchased this year. In fact, on the first page of this very thread a user posted that he bought his 360 in December of 2007 and it failed a few weeks later.
People aren't lying. The machine is freakin unrealiable. MS set aside about 1.1 billion dollars, above and beyond their normal support costs, to deal with this problem -- do you really think they'd need that kind of cash to deal with something that isn't very common?
