part of me is wondering if this is just a case of showing the limits of the current "developers can do qa" development model.

I do think a lot of these issues could be easily caught before shipment by having a well paid adversarial QA department, but at the same time it is easy to see why this is not done, despite all the griping on tech websites about code quality going down all across the board everywhere, it's not like people will stop buying iphones etc. so it's an easy ROI decision to continue with the "users are QA" mindset.