Well I had one of those 2011 MBPs that failed in this way...this was after my warranty expired and clearly before this repair was issued. They told me it would cost me like $350 or $400 or something to replace the motherboard on the thing. Ended up buying a new MBP and selling the bricked one for $100.
There was an enormous thread spanning several years on the apple support forums, so it's a good thing they waited until 4 years later to address this problem...
My MBP had this fault and was out of warranty (I'd taken too long to take it in). They replaced the logic board and screen free of charge. I think the amount shown on the zeroed invoice was close to $1k.
Same Apple Store, my wife showed that her iPhone with cracked screen had dust in the camera, assured them the dust predated the screen smashing and they gave her a new phone.
I suspect newly opened Apple stores are granted a budget to go above and beyond in order to build local reputation.
My local Apple store, however (Eplehuset in Bergen, Norway) flagrantly violates Norwegian warranty law unless you show up multiple times, cite the specific chapter of the law they are violating and then threaten legal action. So it's clearly not a global policy.
But Eplehuset are just authorized resellers, not Apple's stores. We also have Humac and Eplehuset in Denmark (however, Humac just bought all Eplehuset's stores), and that's the same story.
Same exact sentiment here with 2012 rMBP. Had to sell it for much lower and grabbed a new one. The NVIDIA GPU was faulty and it worked fine on Intel only. No way they reimburse the damage.
I got someone at the Apple Store to replace my board a couple years ago.
I'd made a couple trips over a year. Initially, I stopped the reboot by not using the discreet card then I foolishly upgraded to a Mac OS X beta at WWDC then my machine rebooted quite frequently. Tried to grab an engineer to demonstrate the problem but the kernel guys were the only ones who I thought could track it down but I missed them.
There was an enormous thread spanning several years on the apple support forums, so it's a good thing they waited until 4 years later to address this problem...