Yes, service quality is an issue, and we hope competition among registrars will improve it, as well as lowering prices and leading to more innovation in related services. No one is perfect. That is a first step. There's another facet of this NSI stuff that I've encountered which is really bad. It appears that NSI does not protect their web site from some kind of snooping or sniffing or whatever it might be called.
Speculators can grab domain names.
Here's what happened to me. The registration couldn't go thru and I got a message back to that effect. When I saw the e-mail the next day, I attempted to register the name again, but it was taken. In fact, this guy did this to me twice. The first time, Nov of 98, I just used some web site that I'd discovered to check the availability of the name and thought it was coincidental that the name was taken a week later - at that time I wasn't serious about anything and had just been idly looking at names.