Mine's been fine (apart from one storage error on the morning the 1.9.10 firmware was released with the fix). In general, it just sounds like the quality control has slipped with the Touch as compared to the 1 and 2. That said, bear in mind that only people with issues are going to talk about devices, and people without issues aren't really, so any (non-enthusiast) forums are almost inevitably going to be skewed towards people with faulty devices.

In my experience, Kobo's been good with replacements (thought that policy may have changed with the Touch). Borders should be able to replace it, though, right?