Warranty and repair issues are going to vary wildly from country to country, and also over time as companies change distributors. Each individual country (or at least, group, like the EU) has different warranty legislation and requirements, and the quality of service is usually predicated by the distributor, not the parent company (or at least the distributor gets in the middle), so I think we ought to be VERY careful drawing any conclusions about the issue based on reports from either another country, or another time...