There was a time if you had issues with hardware, and email to Steve Jobs actually resulted in a customer escalation. I had one of the 15" MBPs that had the Nvidia chip issue, but never experienced that. But had 3 other problems -- all handled (first time for me with Mac hardware). A polite email on a friday night after I did hit my 4th hardware issue, next trip to the apple store was for a "in kind" based on purchase price replacement.

Apple Software has been suffering for awhile. And where software was involved, he certainly did call teams out for failures, but we also ended up with the path iTunes is on under his watch.

That said, I don't know now, but at a time, an email to Jobs did make things happen.