Apple sold a laptop that melted two weeks after it was bought. They could, instead, have made a laptop that WOULD NOT melt two weeks after it was bought.
I see the cloud as the biggest threat to individual online freedom and privacy. I will continue to buy big Thikpads, and avoid the cloud and tablets and the likes, at all costs.
Regarding the laptop, I haven't heard this being a widespread problem with the Air. Once in a while, everyone comes across a device that has problems regardless of the manufacturer. What I take out of the story is the quality customer service. Good support almost guarantees that they will be a returning customer.
Windows used to do this, but programs on Windows go catastrophically wrong that it is now expected and planned for - it's rare that a user space program impacts performance to the point where I cannot kill it.
While I do absolutely love being able to ctrl+alt+F(x) no matter how bad things are and regain control, the fact that Windows has been able to recover from the window manager, graphics card driver, or even graphics card crashing without my music even skipping a beat for years now makes the reliance on X (by far the least stable component at least on my install) feel wholly unnecessary.
This is often the result of bad graphics drivers. Would you like to share your setup?
My laptop has that ACPI bug (in that the BIOS enables ACPI on peripherals and reports they don't support it back to the OS which then makes terrible decisions). I had to change my screensaver to a non-3D one to prevent the machine from seizing when entering low-power mode.