First Dell and now Apple, both US companies get bad press but deep in each story is the Jap's Sony battery that is the cause. It is the Sony name that should be headlined not the US company. The headline-only readers of the drive-by media will only remember the shot at the US companies.
Looks like this isn't going to be a good year for Sony... first the rootkit, then the failure of their ATRAC format, the complete flop in the US of the UMD format, and now their batteries are slagging down.
I expect a large number of other laptop vendors to start recalling their batteries as well - IBM/Lenovo, for example, used Sony batteries in a number of their products.