Yes, people talked and joked about it. I had a couple of friends with PET's and they would not let you near them if you joked about it. I doubt it impacted sales, but it was definitely part of the culture. Most 8-bit machines had some well-known locations that you could poke values to and make them crash in spectacular ways. My ZX-81 sure did ;-)

By the time the Apple IIe, Commodore-64 and IBM PC came out, they were just a lot better and/or cheaper and that's what really killed the PET..