wazoox: thanks. Do you recall the source(s) for those numbers?
My take: so far, no one has sufficient consistent-across-the-board data at the moment to reach a conclusion about the matter, but the anecdotal evidence presented in that article suggests that Intel SSDs probably have lower failure rates than most traditional and solid-state alternatives. I will keep that in mind next time I buy an SSD.
There are also numbers for hard drives: http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2147063
Basically, Intel SSDs from a year ago are more reliable than all hard drives. And SSDs in general are more reliable than any 2TB hard drive.
The data isn't ideal, but it's better than anecdotes. Return rates should correlate pretty well with failure rates. If anything, return rates should favor hard drives, since people are less likely to return a faulty cheap hard drive than a faulty expensive SSD.
In short, the available return-rate data is too noisy and inconsistent to be a good proxy for failure rates.
[1] http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-reliability-failure-...