Dell servers are excellent. They are beautifully engineered, sacrifice nothing, and are extremely well supported.
Such "Dell sucks" anecdotes are generally of the "my company bought 400 of the cheapest desktops that Dell manufacturers, of which a couple presented troubles. Therefore Dell sucks." variety.
I own nothing from Dell beside my 23" Ultra Sharp monitor and I will tell you that I will never ever buy anything from Dell again.
The monitor is really awesome at its price point and I don't want to miss it but the service Dell is doing is the worst I have ever seen.
Let me tell you why.
When I bought the monitor I was really happy to get a 3 year ultra warranty service from Dell for free. So the monitor gets shipped and I plug into my MacBook Air. The monitor works but the colors are really bad like a 16 bit color scheme. I call the Dell "ultra service" and tell them just what happened. After changing three different employees the guy on the other hand asks me what happens and tell him that the screen looks broken when I plug it into my MacBook and his answer is "oh we don't Mac's cause Apple doesn't conform standard graphical ports. I really don't know about Mac's so I can't help you. Don't you have a "normal PC" to plug it in?". At this point it was clear to me that I would never buy something again from Dell!
It turned out that the monitor was broken and my next monitor worked just fine with my MacBook. the monitor was not replaced by Dell but by the shop I bought from cause they swear that the fault was my Mac.
Next time I will pay the extra money and buy something from Apple again. They don't do shit like that...
Even if Dell's monitors had a 50 percent failure rate and no warranty, you would still be saving money by purchasing only Dell monitors. While price isn't likely your only concern, $1000 for a monitor(even a nice one) is really ridiculous. When you consider the fact that a 27" iMac only costs about $1700, it only seems even more absurd.
My experience with Dell support was actually pretty good. A DVD-drive in my desktop broke after a few months, and after calling Dell support and going through some obligatory motions (turning the computer on/off, re-installing some drivers etc), they just sent me a new DVD-drive.
I hardly want to defend Dell support (knock on wood but I've never, ever had to directly deal with them), however what you experienced is hardly unique -- they see a usage outside of the norm and assume the usage is to blame. Honestly if I were you I would have said "Oh yeah, plugged it into my `normal' PC and it still looks terrible" and they would have replaced it. Unfortunate that it demands a lie or two, but such is the nature of tech support.
And I would hardly give Apple a free pass. They are the ones who are quite eager to blame any issue on a water sensor that is well known to indicate false positives.
Such "Dell sucks" anecdotes are generally of the "my company bought 400 of the cheapest desktops that Dell manufacturers, of which a couple presented troubles. Therefore Dell sucks." variety.