Not an anecdote for once...
One of our clients is a large insurer who have just dumped HP due to reliability problems. They have approximately 3000 laptops in the field. The were all HP business line (EliteBook and ProBook)
Their failure rate in a year was nearly 25% for HP kit.
Moving to Lenovo, they've got a 4% failure rate now.
Now for anecdotes: I've owned two HP workstations (one PA-RISC and one Intel) and both blew up spectacularly, one HP laptop (about 10 years ago - an OmniBook) and it blew up. They stick dynamite in the damn things.
None of which proves the new device is any good.
I don't know what was wrong with your computers, but I've owned 4 HP notebooks, and all have performed spectacularly. They're built solidly and have (for the most part) good hardware-software integration. As with any OEM, there are going to be products at the high and low ends of the line, and similarly there are going to be several failing models.
With HP, I think it really is hit-or-miss. You either get a good computer, or you get a bad one. While my HPs have been good, my friend's G71 hard disk failed.
I've been wary of what I purchase from them, and how it's assembled, but it seems to have worked. Computers are computers, and the #1 thing to fail in them is the user. The #2 thing to fail is the software, and the #3 thing to fail is the hard disk. It's very rare that new PCs come out of any factory with a fried mobo or CPU.
It's just a matter of sifting through all of the junk to find the few hidden gems. HP has a problem with QC, but if you look enough, you'll find great products at even better prices.
It has happened before. I had a 32-bit ARM desktop once: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Archimedes