That's interesting food for thought. BTW, you can return most books for a refund. Even if the reason was that they were trite and cliche and boring. However, I would hope, especially, if the books were missing pages, had pages out of order, had funny colored splotches all over the pages, had pages in different fonts, had the chapters out of order, or had pages in the wrong language. I mean, don't you think a publisher ought to be embarrassed to release a book with quality like that?
I was in a theater one time where the film we were watching melted 20 minutes before the end. I mean literally, melted. It was impossible to watch the film to the end. The theatre gave us free passes to come back and see the film again, or even a different one, later on at the same theatre. Don't you think you owe the consumers something if their experience is incomplete? BTW, if you were watching a film, and you found that entire 5 minute segments out of the film were upside down, or looked like they were filmed through a muddy glass, wouldn't you want your money back? (Again, that's something different from finding the film to be more boring, trite, cliche, etc. than you expected.)
I've never actually returned a book, but I don't do many returns in general unless I just didn't need something. I know people who will buy a hammer, use it for a job, and then return it, and I just think that's tacky. It never occurred to me to take a book back if I didn't like it. Good to know.
For your book analogy, I bet you could return a video game if you could demonstrate that the software was essentially DOA. Additionally, for your analogy to be accurate, we'd have to assume *every* copy of the book had pages out of order and missing. In that case, you would rightly blame the publisher for messing up the publication process, and I'm quite sure they'd lose a lot of money and try to avoid that mistake in the future. I guess I can't quite agree with your comparison to missing pages, because that's a publisher error, not a design error. In this case we'd have to be looking for mistakes caused by EA in the game publishing process, and I wouldn't be surprised if you *could* get a refund for a game that was jacked up at that stage of the game.
Maybe I shouldn't take the analogy too literally, though, since I think your point was more the magnitude of the error than where and how it happened. In response to that, I'd refer to what AlanC9 said: even among our fellow gamers that are familiar with the game and the bugs, we can't determine how serious they are. To one person Sigrun's quest not triggering is gamebreaking, while another might not have even noticed.
Those are interesting and thought provoking questions, soteria. One would hope that companies would see putting out a quality product, good communication and good customer service as paramount to customer satisfaction.
Some companies do. I played World of Warcraft for five years, and although a few bugs stayed in the game for a long time for technical reasons, players mostly knew about those bugs and knew Blizzard knew about them. Most bugs that could be fixed got fixed in days. In fact, I could read about a bug in a recent patch while at work and see a hotfix applied by the time I got home. I've played more single player games than multiplayer, but it seems like in general the single player ones are (relatively) lousy for bug fixes and patches. Part of that could be a lack of incentive for the developer, and part could be that truthfully they don't matter as much in a non-competitive environment.
I'm with you on the ridiculousness of trying to bring something like this to court. What makes it worse is that in the US at least video games are seen as kids' entertainment and unhealthy to boot.
What can we do? Short term, I personally don't plan on getting any DLC until I see certain issues fixed. Otherwise, is there *any* way we can establish some sort of baseline for what makes a game unplayable?
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It's because where are you likely to find people who might care about something like that and notice it .... here. 
