Good thing I haven't done any of the offered updates on my MBP lately - too busy! Sometimes procrastination does pay.
Wonder if Apple will establish a blanket policy of replacing the damaged drives for free now? Or whether it's one of those "hidden warranty" situations - where if you know about it and demand the replacement, you'll get it. One of the comments from a MacFixit user indicates that this is possible. Clearly, they SHOULD do this - the presence of the firmware update on the affected computer should be evidence enough. They'll probably get a few drives that died for other reasons, but that percentage would probably be relatively small.