Their "enterprise" disks (except for Terascale HDD/Constellation CS models) apparently still have 5 year warranties†, and I just had to exchange a big Constellation drive, so I can attest their warranty service is still very good.

†They apparently dropped this to 3 years for the first 6 months of 2012 at least for the big drives who's technology base is consumer ... I suspect that change was not well received.

Unfortunately, you are generally correct that we've seen a race to the bottom.