I met a clerk (girl lai de) very lihai at assemble those CPU, scary see-ing her tear off the clips.. haha. *ahem* back to main topic...

You will need to ask about the warranty and stuff, whether you gets 3-year or just 1-year, possible some won't entertain warranty or some shop has very bad RMA experience, just sell cheap only.
Other than warranty, yes, it's a darn good deal for 1TB 2.5" external HDD.
Source of the statistic... not mentioned?
I've met few failed WDC and also Hitachi, which none on Seagate yet on my long experience so I think I won't rely on such one sided information though.
There's actually a batch of WDC 320GB which failed on few desktop at my clients, that's probably some really bad batch, but since they're out of warranty, I can only replace them with new one.