I've been mostly quiet about a number of quality control issues floating through the Nikon world lately. Instead of being an instigator, I've chosen to wait and see what Nikon's response would be.
The latest problem regards the 24-70mm f/2.8G AF-S: on a number of lenses, the DOF scale lets light into the optic chain that may cause a light streak artifact if you take really long exposures and/or use extremely high ISO values. For 99.9% of your images, it isn't an issue. But for that other 0.1%, it could be a killer. Short answer: Nikon will look at your lens and address it if you've encountered this problem.
There's a fairly clear pattern emerging: new products are being delivered with some (mostly) hidden liability or unknown problem. Internet forums buzz with reports of people encountering these things. After a time, Nikon makes a "quiet" official statement and does on-demand fixes where they think it appropriate. We've seen variants of this pattern now with the 70-200mm VRII (baffle flaking), the 24mm f/1.4G (bad focus), the D3s (low light random failure to focus), and now we've just been made aware of the same thing with the 24-70mm (light leak). I'm sure there are many more recent examples, but these are the ones that have gotten the most visibility lately. None of them have risen to Toyota levels or concern (other than perhaps the 24mm, where if you encountered the problem it rendered the lens unusable).
Try to find any acknowledgment of those things on NikonUSA's Web site and what they'll do about it if you encounter those issues. If you know how to use the Knowledge Base system, you can find some acknowledgements (e.g. this), but I'd say that Nikon is doing a good job of burying their QC problems even when they do acknowledge them.
To me, that's the wrong approach. You don't want to have to go through exotic search requests just to see if the problem you think you've seen is a real one or not. What you want is to know that your vendor of choice is on top of all issues, reports them visibly and accurately, and is active at making customers happy. It's counter-intuitive, but being up front and proactive about problems is better than trying to push them under the rug, as Toyota has discovered the hard way.
The way things have been dealt with historically, it always looks as if Nikon is the last to know about the problems with their products. I have to guess that in a number of cases, they knew of the issue prior to it generating enough Internet buzz that they had to respond. The whole report-to-Japan-and-wait-for-official-response aspect to the Nikon global structure also is problematic. Everything goes through translation two ways, there's not enough local ability to respond, and the whole process takes too much time.
In Japanese culture it's regarded as shameful to have to admit to a failure of any kind. In American culture, we thrive on the fail-and-try-again ethic. A global business has to be transcend its cultural leanings, though. I've long argued that Nikon needs an ombudsman in every subsidiary, and one who's communicating regularly and widely. In situations like these QC issues, the perfect ombudsman response is: immediate acknowledgement that someone has encountered an issue, full disclosure of how the issue will be/was evaluated (or why it was ignored during production if it was known about in advance), and a full explanation of what Nikon will do to correct the problem if someone encounters it.
The funny thing is that Nikon does (mostly) the right thing behind the scenes. In the case of the 24-70mm light leak, if it's really a problem for you, Nikon will look at the baffles on your lens and make corrections to them, if necessary. In my long experience with Nikon, that's always been the case: they fix real problems (maybe not always on their first try ;~). But they don't get enough credit for that because of the way they handle issues in the first place.