It's disturbing to see that tech blogs such as Anandtech (or Tom's) are the ones doing the more thorough testing of those devices. The guy who did it at Anandtech had to jailbreak his phone to get the numbers under the bars!
So basically, Apple was not going to do anything about it, but Anandtech proved this was a huge issue if your signal was already 4 bars or fewer. Now Apple is scrambling for a fix.
Someone said that the initial response to a crisis is the one people remember. You have an extremely short window of opportunity to provide people with an answer (in this case, "yes, we know, sorry, we're working on it" would have been fine), but I think Apple blew it.