First of all, my old CD player used to do this too. That's why you didn't rotate them 90 degrees when they were running. It's caused by the rotational inertia of the disk and some obstruction that wasn't accounted for during rotating a console while it was on in the initial design. There's absolutely NO reason that a design engineer should have to take that into account. Common sense alone tells you that it shouldn't be done. It's like a fork in a toaster. It says all over the toaster not to do it, but people do it anyway. Is it really the fault of the toaster maker?

The new version of the 360 will feature a cooler running chipset and the drive scratch effect will be repaired, so you can stop complaining about it when those come out. MS said this months ago when the problem was first revealed, but either way, as darkshadow says, they do warn you about it, so really, you can only blame yourself. They'll never announce when they put them out though.

There are always problems with the first production set of any major electronics like this, and if you don't think other systems don't have these, think again. Gamecube used to run a little hot (not that it ultimately affected anything, but it was mentioned), the PS2's gunked up with dust and died and the dvd didn't always work after that (I've taken apart and cleaned mine 5 times). Coca-Cola used to have a liberal dosage of cocaine, 2nd generation iMacs had a poor cd drive design (in my opinion anyway), Service packs for Windows, etc. Things have flaws, no design is perfect.

And the first Death Star had ventilation ports you could shoot a pair of proton torpedoes down, just like the PS3's got.