Outsourcing hardware components

[Underpants?]

I know a lot of you out there are responsible for operations-critical hardware, so was wondering if you're seeing more catastrophic failure of hardware due to poor quality-control lately? Do you blame complete delegatory outsourcing of certain critical components?
It's really starting to look this way to me.
Case in point:
Nortel made a phone switch called the northstar, of which there were over ten very stable and successful generations. During this time while not all of the manufacturing was done in Canada, 100% of the component assembly and QC was in-house. The next generation switch, known as the BCM, has been fraught with design problems from day one, including common random reboots which bring down the voip segments and shuts down the network and console management interfaces. The PCI card that has been blamed for the trouble is made and tested overseas.
IBM, Dell, and HP all have used overseas manufacturing forever, a well-known fact, but in the past have done all testing in-vivo at a central corporate location, such as Dallas, Ft Collins or Boulder. in the last 4 years, these companies have shut down 75% of the QA operations stateside, and it's been during the last 3-4 years that I've seen the worst, and by worst, I mean fucking horrible out-of-box issues on mid- to high-end hardware from IBM and Dell (HP /Compaq make some great hardware from what I've heard but I've not yet tried their stuff).
thoughts?

[Foo]

Don't have time to write on the main subject, but HP/compaq most definitely do deliver some serious bang for buck. Rock solid too. We've got a lot (£100k UK) stuff from IBM recently and it seems really shit in comparison.

[Underpants?]

It's good hearing so many high marks for HP/Compaq. I nearly bought a proliant in '00 but the price was staggering compared to a similarly configured Poweredge. Maybe now I know why...