People are not idiots, but they are generally frustrated about support options. If there are tons of people using GS's unofficial support forums instead of your own, that tells you that your system is broken, and needs to be repaired.
Furthermore, many companies offer "unofficial support" pages on their own websites, which are meant to allow people to help each other resolve problems in the case that they are waiting for an official response. GS should not allow themselves to be confused by that type of forum.
They need to remove company logos, remove excessive mentioning of the company's name, and put a big description at the top of the page that explains that GS is in no way related to the company being discussed.
It sounds to me like you have not worked in tech support.
Considering that GS is a hosting site for tech support forums, my opinion is that they should be as close to idiot-proof as possible. For some reason, in my estimation a financial one, they are not.
I'm sure there are plenty of people (me included) who google first, and navigate the site to a support page as a last resort.
Or it means that they have good placement on google results. When I search for "37signals help", the third result is the getsatisfaction page.
Now, in this case the actual 37signals page came up first, but 37signals receives a fair amount of incoming links due to the popularity of their blog. In the case of a company that doesn't play quite as well with PageRank, might getsatisfaction be the number one result? It doesn't seem that unreasonable that some people might end up there instead of the actual support avenues.
SNAP!
Certainly I don't feel 37signals customer support is broken, but there is a point in that quote: Would it have really been that difficult for Jason to have his people monitor a customer-created Get Satisfaction page too?
Honestly, he's probably wasted at least two full work days writing these posts — which could have been direct-from-the-founder responses to a lot of customers while he picked up the phone and had a talk with GS team. After all, all the link-backs from GS to 37signals is only going to boost their SEO overtime. There are a lot of benefits to GS that 37signals ignores in favor of an ego-driven tantrum that has turned me off yet again.
For the record, I am both a 37signals and GS customer.