Yup, Verizon is just a frustrating company claiming they must quality test before its safe on their network. What that really means is we don't want to release squat so we don't have to support it.
No, it means they want to quality test it first. If it weren't for their desire to get WP8 out, they may have waited to even sell devices until after the update, but they decided to go with it.
Chances are that they will know of any issues before their customers do and relay them to MS and Nokia. They deploy employees with every phone they have to test the network and the phones their customers use to ensure the best experience. There always will be some lemons and some bad experiences, but the bulk of the customers don't have that.
My phone, for instance, does not lock up at all and has only reset itself twice in one month. I understand why those with greater issues would want the update sooner. For me, it's unimportant.
I'm with MacPhisto on Verizon's attitude. I can personally vouch for their updates. When the Mango update came out for WP7, I'd already been using Mango for a couple months, as I am a developer and got the update and the whole non-disclosure agreement to go with it. Microsoft had already said that it would be a rolling out period, where a certain percentage would get the update the first week, a larger percent the next week, and each week an increasing percentage, and IIRC they had it available to everyone within four weeks total. On day one, I expected that I would get the udpate, being that my phone was a registered developer phone. I did, but also, my wife's phone got it that day as well, and hers wasn't a registered developer phone. So I wouldn't say that Verizon is any more sluggish than necessary to test for the bugs.
This is Microsoft's first OTA update, so it stands to reason they would roll it out slowly, making sure not to brick large numbers of phones in the process, and make necessary changes between pushes. I keep saying this, but we're all early adopters now. I've been an early adopter for years, so I just accept that in the beginning there will be bugs. Unfortunately, a lot of the people buying Windows Phones right now are not accustomed to this, as they have not been early adopters before. Sorry to say, but it just goes with the territory. There is only so much that can be tested when testing with a small pool of testers, and when you release something like this, especially after a ground-up rewrite, you WILL find more bugs. It's a fact of life.