Since Jan 1, I've had to replace 5 Hitachi Ultrastars, 3 WD RE3s, and 8 Seagate Constellations, all less than 6 months old, all 1TB drives. (They're on loan from our manufacturing side so we can use them for testing, so they have to get returned before they reach 6 months old.) So, I have no real love for Hitachi or WD, but they're better than Seagate.
I don't like the idea of less competition in the desktop HD space, but with the SSD market growing like wildfire, and tons of competition there, I don't mind it so much. the HD market is dropping rapidly, and sooner or later they'll go down like horse drawn plow makers.
SS storage is the way to go. My main machine has nothing but SSDs (2X 120GB Vertex 2s in a RAID 0 and one 120GB Vertex for old game installations) as of a couple weeks ago. My HD storage (4X 750GB WD Caviar Black in RAID 10) went to my server to retire.