Now I'm all for the betterment of technology and the preservation of my vision, but shouldn't it be paramount that the product actually work??? Obviously it's too much 'quality control' to look at the screen before it ships.

Manufacturers do look at them. It's the price we have to pay for affordable technology. If they had to throw away every screen with a single pixel failure, manufacturing yields would plummet and prices would skyrocket.

That being said, I agree that that defintion of what constitutes a defective display is dispicable.