@Summer Storm Pictures.....
I totally understand what you're saying.....and far be it from me to defend any hardware manufacturer, Apple or otherwise. But they all make mistakes and all have their pros/cons. For me, since I own multiple iPhone, iPads, iPods, etc, an Apple laptop was the next logicl choice to complete the ecosystem. Even with its problems/idiosyncracies, Apple is still a superior overall experience for me and my family so I don't regret jumping over the fence to the Apple side. That being said, I'm quite disappointed by this because it all boils down to one thing: quality control. This was entirely avoidable with proper pre-release testing.
I think Apple's main problem right now is that they're losing focus on one of their historical primary selling points: a great customer experience start to finish. Whether it's bugs in OSX, hardware problems, putting exciting new products out that they can't ship for months, mismanaging their supply chain to miss holiday sales and **** off investors, bad OS patches, etc.....they're losing a very important competitive differentiating factor here. I don't expect them to be perfect, but the things above are all solvable problems that they need to get attention on....quickly.
With regard to your laptop....you can certainly turn up the heat on them and go for a new machine, but my guess is that they'll first offer to re-install Mountain Lion for you, so I would be prepared for that. If that doesn't work, then I think you have a pretty good case to raise holy **** and get a new machine because at that point all reasonable options would be exhausted.
Let us know in this thread how it turns out....I'm very curious to see how they handle it.
John