I just don't understand people saying that this is not a big deal. It reflects very poorly on AMD. In fact I am astonished that such a large company does something like that. But since many people don't seem to understand why, let me explain.

AMD don't manufacture the cards themselves they subcontract production. Before any subcontractor start full production of a product they require the signed approval of pre-production samples. Pre-production samples are always made and are a mean to catch any late defect in a product.

In other word AMD would have approved the samples before mass production starts. The only way that this would not have happened is if AMD had agreed to start manufacturing without approving samples, which frankly is unthinkable.

Now, as always, crap happens. And it is possible that for whatever reason the subcontractor screwed up after samples were approved. It is rare but it can happen. 99.99% of the times when this happens, the whole batch is rejected for not conforming to the agreed specifications.

The subcontractor is then responsible at his cost to correct the problem and very often they have to write off the whole batch. And a customer of the size of AMD would most certainly had strong-armed the subcontrator to prioritize its production and/or face monetary penalties.

But what happened here is quite extraordinary. The whole batch was manually "modded" so that the cards could be assembled and sold! This can only mean that either:
AMD was extremely late and had no time to wait for replacement cards (a little doubtful when you see that this was certainly a very good hard launch).
The cards could be made on time but it was too late for sea shipment, and AMD would not pay for air shipping (which is usually what most manufacturers would have chosen in this case)
AMD decided that most people wouldn't notice anyway and the risk of not having a card to compete head on with the GTX570 for the holiday season was just too high

What this shows as well is a lack of respect for the AIBs. And I would be very interested in knowing if the largest such as Asus or Gigabyte have accepted to take delivery of this batch. I wouldn't be surprised if they rejected the cards and decided to wait.

As far as the end user is concerned, although the risk of this mod making the card defective is low, the risk is definitely there. In addition, this could potentially create an absolute mess if one or two years from now the card become defective. And the user will have to trust that the retailer and the AIB will have notified their tech support that this card was moded by AMD, and not modified by the user.

I have nothing against AMD, but this is very poor. If anyone want to purchase that otherwise very nice card, I would recommend to wait for the revised card that will certainly arrive shortly.