What I find amusing is the number of people that say the testers never did a good job, they didn't find all these obvious bugs, etc. Just need to politely remind them that the testers probably did find the bugs (and many more you don't know about); the devs, due to time constraints, didn't fix them. Then there's the whole thing of calling testers Quality Assurance.... but i'll leave that for another time...
It is a sad fact that so many games get released in such a buggy state. I remember buying Neverwinter Nights 2 and couldn't complete it for 3 months due to map change crashes (another Obsidian title). Consoles suffer the same problems now, I guess internet updates aren't such a good thing after all, though unfortunate events like with Metroid: Other M can happen - corrupt save and no patches.
Would of thought first impressions were quite important... I guess they don't matter so much anymore. We're sold a promise rather than a finished product. Still, I can't complain too much, Mass Effect 2 was buggy when first released, but that didn't detract from the fun... unlike Alpha Protocol.
