Well, it must be a US thing to have bad customer service issues because every Dell experience that I've had from the UK operation has been the exact opposite. I ordered my tier 4 AW17 on July 15 and it arrived 4 or 5 days ahead of schedule on the 24th. That was 9 days to get a top of the line machine and as I said, my experience of Dell has always been the same. The only glitch was when I ordered an XPS 15 laptop in late November 2011 and the delayed it for 6 weeks due to the holiday rush, or at least that's what they told me anyway.
But get this. I bought a Studio XPS 16 laptop in 2009 with a 12 month warranty. 4 months after the warranty expired, the blu-ray rom drive failed and swallowed my Mass Effect 2 disc, badly scratching it. I called customer services the next day and spoke to a very pleasant lady who gave me 3 options. 1. Buy a new laptop since a replacement drive would cost £500 or more to replace (not including the repair charges). 2. Pay for the repair myself at the costs just described. 3. Agree to a new 1 year premium warranty for £110 there and then and she'd send an engineer out the next day to replace the drive under warranty! To say I was stunned is an understatement. She then asked if I'd hold whilst she spoke to her manager, and then came back and said that because I was a good repeat customer I could have a 2 year warranty for the same £110. I bought the warranty and the next day an engineer turns up at my place of work and replaces the optical drive. It gets better, because when he reassembled the machine and booted it up, I could see that the new drive was reported as a BD-RW. He'd been given a blu-ray rewriter to replace my broken blu-ray rom drive! I cannot think of a better service than that experience. I got a £700+ repair done the next day to a machine that had been 4 months out f warranty for £110 and got a 2 year premium warranty at a knock down price as well.
Maybe I just got lucky. But Dell treated me well with the optical drive replacement and shipped me a tricked out top of the line 17 in 9 days flat so from my perspective, Dell are great.