Especially compared to Blackberry, iOS has never had a good alarm system. Kind of a shame, as that would be a fairly tractable feature for a single employee to own. Third party alarm apps have obvious problems, too.
Well up to iOS3.x at least it always worked as far as I can remember. I actually like its interface quite a bit, it's fast and clean - shame it's so useless.
You're right there are a few things that should have been caught in QA.