Apple have always had flaky products when it's something new. The first PPC macs, the first Intel Macs, OS X 1.0, and so on. Those of us that have been in the apple universe for a long time remember "don't use rev 1 of a product" was a mantra amongst Apple users since way back.

So, problems with the iPad Air are not particularly surprising. The shift to a 64 bit OS is a difficult thing to get perfect on a first go.

That said, they really should have nailed the discrete GPU kernel panics on rMBPs by now. That's been going in fir a couple of revs of the hardware and is unusual.