Unfortunately, your experiences don't indicate that Toshiba is any worse than any other brand. I can't tell you how many Compaqs I've seen for example... But Compaq is also one of the best selling laptops. Under my best guess, I've serviced (literally) several hundred laptops. Out of the ones with hardware issues, I've come to the conclusion there's no good brand.
Sony, Toshiba, IBM, Compaq, HP, Gateway, Fujitsu, Dell.... I've seen different models from them
all with many bad system boards and other internal hardware problems.
I admit that see some more, but its often the bigger brands such as Dell and HP... Of course I am going to see more of these because these are the best selling laptops. That means there's going to be more of these out there to break and end up on my bench at the end of the day.
I've seen my share of Toshibas as well, but nothing really sticks out as unusual. The numbers the problems I've seen have been nothing but ordinary.
Maxtor generally has a lot more HDD crashes than other brands, from what i've heard.
After Maxtor's merger with Quantum, they became the largest drive manufacturer in the world. So much like I see more Dells and HPs than other laptops, it makes sense that people see more Maxtors than any other product.
The bottom line is if you search any name brand for reviews, you're going to find a ton of complaints. You go to any forum and you'll see all these random recommendations, "Western Digital is the best!" and "Seagate roX0rz!", but the reason you see so many different companies recommended is because
no one really knows.
Unfortunately, drive manufacturer's are sheepish about publishing their AFR (Annual failure rate) which would be the only real, factual way to end this debate. I'm willing to bet, for consumer desktop drives, they are all about the same.
And just to throw it in, here's an article from Google outlining some research regarding drive failure rates:
http://216.239.37.132/papers/disk_failures.pdf