Yawn. Anecdote mean nothing. I could find a similar rant about virtually any product just by scanning Newegg customer reviews.
There are tons of people happy with there 5870s. Just like I could find some people who had problems with there 285s. Just the way PC hardware works.
-And of course the one sane post here gets skipped over for more fanboi ranting. Fact is people have different experiences with different cards which makes some people swing one way or another.
I've never had driver problems with any ATI card I've owned (9800pro/x800/4850, although the x800 was just a piece of shit for its own reasons), but I've had a cavalcade of issues with my Nvidia cards (Geforce 2 MX was nice, GF4 TI was awesome, 7900GT was a god forsaken piece of crap [enabling shadows in games would cause artifacts up and down], 8800GTS 320 went belly up). Let alone the nightmarescape that was upgrading to Vista with not only the 7900GT but an Nforce4 motherboard (which was the one that was actually responsible for all my driver crashes, not the 7900).
A good friend of mine nearly killed himself on account of old ATI Rage, went Nvidia and never went back until he got the 5770. According to him, ATI's drivers are no better or worse than Nvidia's as far as performance and stability is concerned, they just lack some features which to him is no biggie.
Fact is, when relying on anecdotes, you can always find someone or something to back your claim. You just can't make generalized conclusions about it. after my recent Nvidia experiences I'll be staying with ATI for a bit, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't recommend an Nvidia card should it make sense or vice versa.