My office just bought a new workstation from Dell -- using Dell as the vendor, at the insistence of the business-office people. I was surprised at how little Dell was willing to meet the requirements for the machine, particularly for a regular customer of theirs. The request was
for 2-socket Nehalem, 24GB RAM, 6 TB RAID0 for scratch data, 250GB SSD for system/home, Linux or no-OS (in which case, we'll install ourselves).

Dell insisted on: No RAID unless all disks are identical and it is a single RAID volume, nothing else; they'll sell the SSD but the customer has to install it; must be Windows7.

As far as I'm concerned, Dell was completely non-responsive. If I had the authority, they would have lost that sale -- and any other sales to our group. (Other vendors, by the way, were quite cooperative and competitive...)

FWIW