I emailed apple and got a ER rep from apple and over the first 4 weeks of ML's release went back and forth with tech support and engineers. Executive Relation rep that helped me was an absolute joke. I get they all can't be tech people, but at least get me with competent personnel. I have a 2011 top of the line iMac, which is still for sale today, and it's unreal. It's been powered down now for 2 months and buying Windows when I get the money will be about the only way I can fix this.
Faith is lost in apple with my household and work, and I gratefully read another thread about Image Retention on the retina MBP too and could duplicate it on the default grey apple wallpaper. Seperare subject and I won't derail this one. below is that discussion.
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4034848?answerId=19519164022#19519164022&ac_cid=tw123456#19519164
But all these issues from apple have me wondering what's going on. They have billions so lets just coast on our reputation? Tell customers it's performing as intended? Someone is seeding salt into the soil of apple's walled garden and we are unfortunately reaping the rewards.
So far reinstalling hasn't fixed this for users, a clean install hasn't fixed it, and 10.8.1 and possibly .2 aren't either. Granted and hopefully that changes. Only solution I've seen posted is a reverting back to 10.7.4. But that is a lot of time and work. Plus, I've noted 10.8 pulled the fans back on macs allowing them to run about 15C hotter than under lion, but with decreased performance. Coincidentally, I've gotten a lot of pixel failures on the two iMacs since July. Likely related to ML's increased heat. Hoping this hasn't damaged my hardwar.
Everyone in this thread has done a good job of sharing information and narrowing it down to a software issue.
The only culprit I can imagine this to be is firmware/kernel/driver related. And unfortunately this is out of our hands.