I have to be honest, quite a bit of this seems reasonable in Dell's part -- I would expect a like for like swap, and to have to give back the broken part, else the possibility for fraud is too high.
The only other company to come close is Sandisk, who once sent me an upgraded version of my mp3 player when my head phone jack broke
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Cue a pneumatic drill and a circular saw. Modern drives are surprisingly hard to drill, btw, what with being so dense.
After the second replacement failed too after a couple of weeks, I just went and bought a disc from the local shop down the road. It's probably still going, twelve years latter. We never bought Dell again.