Yes, the book "Inside Intel" makes the same argument about spreadsheets (p364). My opinion is that Intel's analysis is mostly objective, while IBM's analysis is kind of a scam.
IBM's result is correct if we interpret "one user experiences the problem every few days" as "one in a million users will experience the problem 5000 times a second, for 15 minutes every day they use the spreadsheet with certain values". It's an average that makes no sense.
