Recognizing a huge mistake is one thing. It was the publicly admitting it that is un-Apple. They could have just silently stayed the course for awhile before announcing they had changed they're mind.
Apple admits they've made mistakes in a number of ways, I'm pretty sure they've verbally said "we've made a mistake, we're doing this instead". The more interesting facet is they admit a mistake whilst sticking to their original notion.
Yup. My first-gen white MacBook back in 2006 was one of the ones afflicted by the random shutdown issue (http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1599). It took over a year iirc of local Apple stores blindly trying heat sink and logic board replacements before central management publicly acknowledged that an issue existed and promptly released a firmware upgrade to turn the fans on. Problem resolved.
