I'm not aware of Dell's official failure rates but .3% doesn't sound unreasonable.
If they did have 1 in 300 fail in one specific way they would at least acknowledge the problem and fix it; then again Dell care if their customers come back.
Even if that's an accurate number of returns to KnC, imagine the number of people who aren't interested in paying for and waiting for shit to ship to Sweden, to be fixed, and then shipped back. If you're competent enough with a soldering iron you can have new plugs the next day delivered from Digikey, or solder some leads right to the board.
Exactly, those who can't spare the hashing time or money in addition to those who have preempted the failure and taken action before it happens. I tried the stock setup with high quality 16AWG and 2/5 sockets failed thus far.
u27