All they really can do for a fix is wait until next year (or as MS said, 12:00 Noon GTM January 1, 2009). How are you going to roll a firmware patch out onto a bricked Zune? They're lucky this was a temporary problem, or they would have had a lot of recalling to do. As soon as the un-bricking takes place tomorrow, MS should be able to roll out a patch, they have the next four years to do it. I'm sure it will come out pretty quickly to quell the chance of this happening again, but you never know.
The worst part about this whole incident was Microsoft's inability to inform the public of what was going on. If they would have said, this is what we think, and here's what we're going to do about it, I don't think people would have freaked about the problem(see the zune support forum) as much as they have. Instead, they made a small announcement kept absolutely quiet for about half a day. I understand people probably will get mad when they spend $200 dollars on something like the Zune, but the combination of whining in the Zune forum, and Microsoft's inability to keep the public at least slightly informed just made things worse. This just adds another bad mark onto Microsoft's track record...