Following the myriad of links, one of the main problems seems to be inadequate cooling on the GPUs, leading to failures occurring from critical temps being reached pretty easily.
With my card, I was horrified to see it running as the hottest thing in my system - even OCed my CPU ran a full 20 degrees cooler on all cores than my GPU - so I installed teh eVGA Precision (after first trying RivaTuner) to manually run the fan a lot faster than the stock 37% when temps are under 80 deg C.
Now, I haven't experienced any failures, but I bet the day my fan dies (if it happens) I'll be one POed mofo. However, this is getting traded in for a 260, so....