It has happened to us too, though it was very easily fixed in our case due to the excellent deadlock reporting. And I can also confirm that the case for Joel (the original reporter) is also a real world case.

Link to talk about it http://www.pgcon.org/2012/schedule/events/483.en.html

Edit: Not sure if I would call it braindead though. Highly annoying, yes. Alvaro has spent a lot of time into solving this, it is much harder than it initially seems.