AppleCare for a $1700 MacBook Pro costs $350. Does that mean one in every five MacBooks is broken beyond repair within 3 years? Or does it mean that you severely overpaid for your insurance?
I'm aware that AppleCare doesn't just cover the parts but the labor as well, but their margin on hardware is probably somewhere around %40, so that covers the labor easily.
I guess all hardware vendors would absolutely love to sell you a luxury insurance like that and if they're not idiots they treat people paying like kings accordingly (e.g by doing it quickly and not saving on shipping fees).
Maybe, but remember there's a pretty big invisible hardware R&D cost. Things like unibody, multitouch, internal battery, displayport, etc. aren't free. And Snow Leopard probably cost a bit more than $29/seat to develop.
All of that to say, find me a manufacturer that will replace 70% of your system in 22 hours including courier time almost three years after it was sold. You can only do that if your reliability is way high, because you spent a lot of money on quality components to begin with, instead of poor-boying it with sweatshop chips.