At the moment, the reliability problem with SSDs stems entirely from firmware bugs, rather than the underlying flash technology. All the issues you hear about with regards to drives causing blue screens or simply failing to be recognized by the system at all after a while are issues with the firmware on the controller chip - the actual flash chips themselves are pretty dumb and rarely fail catastrophically.
This will get better with time, as SSD firmware accumulates the kind of run time (in terms of number of hours x number of units in use) over years that HDD firmware has had.
It would be nice to see the SSD manufacturers get a clue about recovering data. Having the device fail catastrophically is nuts; it means that all of the carefully designed recovery schemes in the file system are basically worthless.
Agreed. Right now it is a performance arms race - IOPS trumps everything.
However, bigger and bigger enterprise vendors are doing rigorous qualification tests on SSDs for white-labeling purposes and demanding that the firmware be bulletproof. Admittedly the enterprise workload is a bit different from a laptop (servers never go to sleep) but they are the ones accumulating the most runtime given 24 hour uptimes.
This will get better with time, as SSD firmware accumulates the kind of run time (in terms of number of hours x number of units in use) over years that HDD firmware has had.