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My uncle has bought one in the States (I'm in Italy, here it isn't sold yet) and when he came back home he did experience problems when holding it "not the apple way".
To be precise, he did notice the signal drop when he still was in the USA, but it wasn't really troublesome; when he showed it to me here, though, holding it "the bad way" made his iPhone show the "no carrier" warning.
It's no surprise to me: I work with antennas everyday and I knew that placing the antenna where it could touch the skin could prove troublesome. Also, the mobile network we have in Italy is different from the ones used in USA, and uses smaller frequencies and lower power, that's why here the problem is "enhanced". It was to be expected.
Anyway, there's one thing I want to point out: this is one hell of a stupid mistake made by Apple's engineers, sure, and probably it was caused by the fact that the team who designed the iPhone 4 was composed of electrical engineers and designers, with noi telecomunications/antenna engineers in it, but the iPhone 4 isn't the first smartphone to suffer this problem.
I'm not saying this to say that Apple is justified or anything: in my point of view (that of a telecomunications engineer), they should reclaim the "faulty" iPhones and move the antenna INSIDE the case, where it can't be bridged by skin contact (like every mobile phone should do these days), but to be honest the same should do (or should have done) several other smartphone producers.
For example, the Nokia N97 mini, if held with your right hand, and with the base of your thumb touching the lower-right corner of the device, shows the same problem. If you measure the loss in antenna gain, it's about -24 dB. It's not common to hold the phone that way, but it can happen. The HTC Hero, if held the same way as the iPhone 4, loses 2 signal bars (loses -13 dB of antenna gain). The Nokia E75, if you cover the whole keyboard with your hand, loses almost completely the signal. And there are other cases, but at the moment I don't remember them all.
People is complaining more about the iPhone 4, though. And I can't blame them: there have been complaints to Nokia too, and even though Nokia never replaced the "faulty" phones, they acknowledged the problem and modified the devices built after the problem was discovered; Apple is keeping a "deny everything" policy right now. Also, in many cases the "death grip" on other phones was a grip that was actually seldom used on a phone, like placing your whole hand on the keyboard or holding just the base of the phone (making it easy to fall); in the case of the iPhone, it's an uncommon grip but not a rare one.
I just hope that now, thanks to the noise that people is making around the iPhone 4, smartphone producers will not repeat the same mistake AGAIN, and stop thinking that any electrical engineer can design antennas and will consider for the future hiring more people whose field of experties is radio signals and antennas.
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