Given that the PS3 has a 10% failure rate, and hte Wii 6.8%...are those in acceptable failure ranges? 

It would also help, if Dan wasn't pawning anti-Xbox 360 books, as some might get the impression that he was trying to build excitment for his books.  A "smoking-gun" email would make this story more believablle:

About the Author, Dean Takahashi

Dean is lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat. He covers video games, security, chips and a variety of other subjects. Dean previously worked at the San Jose Mercury News, the Wall Street Journal, the Red Herring, the Los Angeles Times, the Orange County Register and the Dallas Times Herald. He is the author of two books, Opening the Xbox and the Xbox 360 Uncloaked.

If you have an xbox that was built prior to the release of Halo 3 (prior Sept 2007) it probably is about a 66% failure rate and is probably down to less then 10% on new units. Like someone said MS took care of the problem by extending the original full 3 month warranty to a full 1 year and 3 years for the RRoD and now the E74.
That being said if you go by a game informer survey you are talking about a magazine where most of the readers are hardcore gamers or fanboys and you have no way of verifying that the survey wasn't filled out by a fanboy of a competing console. (don't say that doesn't happen because those PS3 numbers even seem to be at least double what my assumption is)

@ the damage control squad trying to turn this thread around and complain about what sony did years ago, the 360 is the crappiest console ever built, nothing you say can change that.

of course, this thread was made by a ps3 fanboy...

seriously its probably higher than normal.

yeah, and that means the guy did a research and wrote a book about it. >_>

I'm sure he wrote TWO BOOKS on a 4 Year old console becasue it was too much information for one book...lol...that bridge in Brooklyn is still for sale. 

Btw, here's some more data points from the scientific survey, which I'm still having problems tracking down:

Console failure rate

Xbox 360 – 54.2%
Playstation 3 – 10.6%
Wii – 6.8%

Percentage of console owners who suffered a second hardware failure after the original repair.

Xbox 360 – 41.2%
Playstation 3 – 14.7%
Wii – 11%

Percentage of people who rate their customer service experience "very helpful"

Nintendo – 56.1%
Sony – 51.1%
Microsoft – 37.7%

Percentage of respondents whose friends have had console hardware failures.

Xbox 360 – 69.9%
Playstation 3 – 12.4%
Wii – 6%

Very contradictory my friend. You just admitted they made a mistake by thinking they could just patch the problem.

@Xoj - Check out the solder whiskers theory too that is out there, the information came courtesy of Nasa research.  I'm not sure if Valahalla (one chip solution) is needed if they just wanted to shrink the die sizes of GPU and CPU and design a better motherboard with a smller footprint given there is less requirement for caps on the board now.

To the rest, why attack Xoj as in this case he is stating a fact that Microsoft dropped a huge clanger with the 360 design.  Sure they've improved the situation have Microsoft and the warranty helps a lot but there is no denying they released a product with huge reliability problems and have been unable to truly fix it yet.  Admittedly the big issue is I guess some people want him to admit Sony have done the same too.

I'm one of those weird people that hasn't had their 360 die!

Infact in my household its the wii thats broken.

Yeah well this is nothing new.

We all now that the 360 does that..

But still people seem to like it to buy bad hardware for a low price..