Okay, Im seeing some ATI/AMD slamming going on here... Lets clarify:
ATI driver 'issues' usually revolve around a few things:
On windows, if you upgrade to the latest catalyst and do a full uninstall/reboot/reinstall windows driver in device manager - you might get slapped a little. Eg: a game may crash when some look nice feature is enabled. Have I experienced this? No. Why? When ATI said, ooh look we just made CCC 12.8 and released it 6 hours ago I waited a day, typed 'catalyst 12.8 issue' into google and found that it was quite stable, so I upgraded. This will avoid you 99% of problems. Also, if your setup of catalyst is fine - in other words nothing wrong with it: don't touch it for funzies and go to the absolute bleeding edge. Just like with open source. If you do - you sort of deserve a bit of pain in exchange for being on the bleeding edge.

On linux things are not as clear cut: you can opt for open/closed source drivers.
open source radeon drivers: IMHO is nicer - it has almost all the chinks ironed out now, runs great for your desktop, is native as they come and is built right in. The down sides are that it can hurt DirectX performance under wine by some 10-40%+ depending on the game. Although this is to be expected somewhat - does linux used DirectX? Not really. So why include it? There you go.
Closed source fglrx: if you go this route you get the ATI speeds on everything albeit ATIs driver team has its reputation. In 3 years of having these installed I cam accross 1 issue which is shared with nvidia cards: docky has a random bug in it and one from my ignorance as a result of a badly botched Xorg.conf for multi-monitor support which had some 'garbling' in some 3d opengl textures.. wiping Xorg.conf and getting an updated deb for the game fixed it so I can't complain.

So what it comes down to is whether you NEED the very best, macish driver support, albeit usually at an extra cost. Since this is not a 600 euro build, AMDs offerings tend to have the market well in hand.

SSDs: I've had my SSDs 2 years, its my primary and only disk - it has 158.2 days of power on time in 340 power cycles. SMART data says not a single sector is bad, and thats the same experience for anyone in my family who has one for work as well as family friends (although one of my friends' intel drive failed after 18 months...) I would conclude that if your drives die after 2 years you're dong something wrong in some way. For example: SWAP file/partition. Bad BIOS/driver/firmware/application setup... Or any number of factors. In short its inconcievable for an SSD to have largely inferior life to an HDD - it has no moving parts, it has management to keep sectors equally used and it does things in a timely manner which avoids users getting annoyed and going into buzzkill mode on the mouse and thrashing the disk.

As much as I like intel - they sit in all my laptops at the moment and an old desktop from the sandy bridge announced and about to ship hype era... Well, old.... Its a dual core deal at some crazy GhZ.... Intel run hot. Very hot. This was blamed on north/south,xyz bridges and chipsets and then intel put them on die and it was the magic pixies' fault as to why a die shrunk, locked down Xeon runs hotter than anything seen before on a custom cooler is beyond me. My X3 is oced on its stock cooler by a fair margin - and its rarely hits 50C. GPU wise my 5750 hits 85 at peak times. Thats not a big deal - 100-105C is usually the overclockers start being careful, 110C is the problem zone and 115C is the emergency shutoff and 120-125C is the damage zone.

Thats my opinion - and although it sounds like AMD fanboyism I have 1 AMD machine and my sister has one. The other 5 are intel machines and I'll leave it at that. True AMD doesn't do the highest end stuff, and if I were serving up databases for datacentres a dual Xeon/i7 it would be...