Its kind of hit and miss. But the majority of the fried ones have been in the PAL regions like the UK. It’s being caused from a combination of bad laser head coils and poor quality LA6508 Driver IC. What’s happening is that if the laser head coils are defective or bad from lets say a few or more coils being shorted this drives the resistance of the coil down from where it should be, around 4-5 Ohms thus increasing the current/voltage that the LA supplies thus making the poorly designed LA get hot to fast and burning up. This in combination with a mod chip seams to be happening more because the laser of course has to work harder to read back-up media (this is not the mod chips fault, just the general nature of back-up media) thus asking for more power from the LA, and if the coils where weak to begin with, now that they are getting more power, the whole thing just starts to snow ball, as one coil goes the coil gets hotter, burning the enamel off the next closest coil and so one and so on until its shot driving the current draw from the LA way hirer then designed.
Now you would have thought Sony would have come up with a fault interruption scheme that would safeguard the LA from toasting it self, but apparently they didn’t, so when this starts to happen poof there goes not only the laser but the LA as well.
Luckily there are a few places online that are supplying the LA's so they can be replaced, but you then have to replace the laser as well, and the problem could just rear its ugly head once again. So to combat this some people are putting resisters/fuses inline with the LA to keep the LA from frying if the laser takes a dump. This has its plus and minuses in my opinion. There are other creative solutions that people are trying to market. One very interesting one is a mod chip looking PCB with on LA/BA on it that you run wires from to the mobo. One design is using an LA; the other I have seen is using a BA from the older boards. I kind of like the BA design because the BA's for one are cheaper, and also they are suppose to me tougher. Only time will tell to see what happens with this fix. Here is a link with a little info on these.
http://www.gamefreax.de/cgi-bin/gf_site/news.pl?lang=UK
So to answer your question finally, there is no verdict, it’s more like cross your fingers and hope.