Yes, I worked at IBM at the time of the DeskStar debacle. And at the time of the disk drives with the "Hungarian" firmware which would occasionally forget to perform writes (the "hungarian" is actually a misnomer, since supposedly Yamoto was also crucially involved, but "Hungarian" sounds funnier, and "Transsylvanian" sould sound even better).
Plus, my server at home had two 1TB Barracudas, neither of which survived all that long. A friend had another handful of those, and his also died. But the problems don't only affect consumer disk drives; in my work, I've come across problems with a large shipment of thousands of drives (manufacturer, customer and OEM withheld to protect the guilty) with failure rates that were double-digit percent within the first few weeks. Which goes to prove that multiple companies are capable of creating really bad hardware.
I agree your argument of buying disks that have long warranties; that really works if you are interested in long-term reliable drives. The reasons are much more complex though. It's not as easy as saying that the manufacturers make a whole lot of platters or heads, then sort them into good or bad ones, and put the good ones into high-warranty drives. In reality, long-endurance (a.k.a. enterprise) drives are built with completely different manufacturing processes and hardware designs from consumer disks. There is a really good paper about that by Erik Riedel and Dave Anderson about the differences; for example, they might include things like air filters in enterprise drives, different design of bearings and different lubricants, or a second CPU for simultaneous servoing while performing R/W operations in a vibration-rich environment. The workload that the disks are expected to see is also crucially different: Consumer drives tend to be idle most of the day (often even spun down), while enterprise drives tend to be busy all the time 24x365. That leads to different hardware optimization, in terms of power consumption, lubrication, heating, cycling.
And: long-term reliable disk drives are by necessity more expensive. If you are optimizing for $/byte, your workload pattern is a good match to consumer drives, and you can tolerate occasional failures, then a consumer drive with short warranty is a much better fit for your application. For example, on my server at home I use enterprise-grade nearline drives in a RAID mirrored setup. But for the external off-site backup (which is left powered off most of the time, only used every few days or weeks, and regularly scrubbed), I use a cheapo archive drive that I got at Costco for way less than $100. It does its current job very well, and is very cost-efficient. If it were to fail, I would toss it in the trash and buy a new one; as long as I don't get a correlated failure (it fails at exactly the same time that my home server is wiped out by a site disaster), I don't need it to be super reliable.