I read in one of the blog comments that a cat peed on the connector? Is that true? If that's what happened, I'm not sure how fault lies with Apple.

If it is poor manufacturing, then it's definitely not welcome news for Apple. Sounds like Apple took troubleshooting the problem in the pictures pretty seriously and had people looking into the issue before the owner even contacted Apple. IMHO, it's nice to see a company being proactive ^