People were certainly mad about it, but the companies didn't have to face a lawsuit, so as far as they were concerned it seems like it was a great argument :-\
> When you buy the exact same product and end up with something that has substantially lower quality parts than what the reviewer had, you've been defrauded.
How exactly do you define "substantially"? No matter where you draw the line, you'll get people who will toe it and that will be legal. And in any case it's very hard to argue fraud when the company itself didn't tell you that the device was that good. You'd just get companies (rightly) saying that they aren't responsible for purchasing decisions you made based on things that third parties have said.
From someone like Amazon's perspective, it's also not reasonable to declare that absolutely no changes can be made to a product to keep it under the same listing, which is really the only way you can make this a black-and-white issue. It would also be doing consumers a disservice if every time a trivial thing changed (e.g. logo placement on the box, or the manufacturer adds an extra screw to make the body stronger, or whatever) the entire history of reviews and ratings got reset. So the best solution we have right now is to say "look man, don't be an ass"... and unsurprisingly, people who want to be an ass are more than happy to disregard this in order to make an undeserved buck.
When you buy the exact same product and end up with something that has substantially lower quality parts than what the reviewer had, you've been defrauded.
Edit: it hurts the reviewer too, as I now have reasonable evidence that $review_body is unreliable. If the fraud never comes to light, I may stop using they publisher's reviews.