Yeah, exactly, and that's kind of my point; there's not really much wisdom through that comparison in my opinion. I guess I am just saying that I don't agree with the sentiment behind "software I use should never crash" or the reasoning that chairs don't "crash" or something like that.
The trouble is that there's really no 'reasonable' amount of instability. The amount of instability we tolerate is essentially arbitrary. Desktop computers can have uptimes of several months to potentially years, which when I was younger (not that long ago, but long enough) would've been completely unheard of (And yeah, I'm sure microcomputers with vastly simpler software/hardware could run for a lot longer, but I think it's fair to say that's not a very fair comparison). For me Windows XP hardly lasted longer than a few days before things started to get kind of weird, and I consider Windows XP to have been amazingly stable for its time.
I think the state that we're at now is actually a result of software engineering and computers getting better. The software has gotten immeasurably more complex than say, the Windows 9x days, and yet stability has improved in many dimensions. If we were still making software with the same complexity and cardinality I can only imagine it would be significantly more stable, but it's always hard for the theoretical part of something to keep up with the practical part.