I will probably pre-order it so if you see me bitching about it here then you will know to wait for at least a couple of patches as I have a certainly tolerance for bugs but CTD's drive me absolutely nuts.

I'll be keeping an eye out for any such comments. For me it depends on the type of CTD and bugs. For instance, Fallout 3 had 'clean' CTDs in that you were immediately returned to the desktop. Thus you could immediately return to the game. Whereas some games leave a blank screen in front of the error message you need to close.... to get rid of the blank screen that's in front of it. Yeah, those are annoying. Bloody annoying.

I expect New Vegas to be relatively polished because it's basically an expansion to a completed game and Bethesda strike me as much more likely than SEGA, Atari or Lucasarts to give Obsidian time and resources to make a polished product. J.E. Sawyer said on his twitter months ago that the core game was done and they were polishing.
And frankly I never saw one bug in Alpha Protocol.

New Vegas is the only thing that comes close to the excitement of Halo and honestly RPGs are still niche compared to shooters. Don't get me wrong, I bought the first Fallout because it was the spiritual successor to Wasteland, which I also played as a kid. I've enjoyed something about all the Fallout games since then. But even I can admit RPGs aren't the most popular genre in gaming.
Halo Reach has been advertised like crazy, far more than any of those others on XBox Live. Fanboys are drooling with anticipation, if it even turns out mediocre that'll be enough for the fanbase to declare it an unconditional success no matter what you orI may think.