I think the incentives are also for people to buy a first generation car and work out the bugs we find. I also trained a salesman and service rep on many features of the TLX they did not know about. Forums are great for disseminating information among ourselves so we can understand and troubleshoot our own car.
We are the real front line technicians.
These gifts are not very expensive considering the cost of the car (50K+ when including taxes, winter tires in some cases, etc). It does not in my opinion take a great deal of effort for the dealer to throw these in...

. On the other hand would I chance an inferior and untested product for some wine glasses or wine bottle...I don't think so otherwise I would spend 50$ to buy my own wine glass or bottle.
But you are right about the complexity of the car nowadays. Loaded with sensors and thousand of lines of programming; there is a lot more that can go wrong compared to cars 40 years ago. New features are introduced from one model line to the other and sometimes even in the same line from one year to the next . And there is a lot of pressure from management to get the product out as early as possible before someone beats you to the punch. So the development team does as much testing as possible but at some point in time the product has to come out... with some bugs coming out with the production model.
One may wait a few years for the bugs to have been fixed but as many of you know when patching a bug (specially in software) a new one is created. Hey just look at Windows...
So what is the best solution. IMO go with a supplier/manufacturer who has a better track record than most in its product line. This usually means that they will show somewhat more restraint before putting a faulty product on the market (unless you have a captive market such as Microsoft). On this basis for cars, my choice is Honda/Acura based on my experience with them for the past 24 years.
Enough ranting, here is a few post of my new baby...picked her up last Friday night (the one on the right, the beast on the left belongs to my wife)
