My wife's iPad wasn't bricked, but it was certainly crippled by a similar bug two days ago (Friday). When my wife attempted to sync her iPad prior to upgrading

My wife's iPad wasn't bricked, but it was certainly crippled by a similar bug two days ago (Friday). When my wife attempted to sync her iPad prior to upgrading to 4.3.3, she was informed that the sync couldn't be completed. No error code or other reason was given. She could not therefore upgrade because the first step in the process is a sync. It got worse. After a few attempts, she powered off and restarted her iPad. Instead of the normal boot up, she got icons indicating she must connect the iPad to iTunes. When she did, she was advised that she was required to reset the device. Now the real nightmare begins. After resetting the iPad, she had lost all but four of more than 100 mostly purchased applications. This should not be a problem, as the app store knows that an application has been purchased and will re-download it for free. But nobody told iTunes which applications to download. In the apps section, only 67 of her apps were recoverable. And those "updated" (meaning were restored) fine. Over the next day or so by browsing the extremely unhelpful app store, where applications are so excessively categorized it is virtually impossible to browse the huge catalog, and checking her email history she was able to make a list of (some of the dozens) of apps still missing. Then she had to go through the tedious process of using the App Store on her iPad to search for and reload each application separately, which took hours. At the end of this, she has no assurance there aren't still missing apps. The original bug was bad, having to reset and lose all her on-device application data even worse, but the inability to smoothly restore previously purchased applications through iTunes and/or the App Store exposed a major design flaw that just fixing the bug won't address.