For some reason I can't get to the article. Anyway as another anecdotal data point: We have a few Google Search Appliances where I work. When one of them broke (rather catastrophically) Google Support was on top of it and the problem was fixed relatively quickly.

Edit: I suppose this is a case of "you get what you pay for". Google Search Appliances are non-trivially expensive. I guess they wouldn't be able to get away with bad support for those.