Well, we have 2 kinds of things we do:
1. We publish details these and tell the big PC manufacturers. The press regularly review our
http://developer.intel.com website. The PC makers and motherboard makers have the option to tell their customers directly.
2. If it is a big issue, we tell the press directly - and they in turn make everyone aware.
In this case, since this is an extremely rare issue (only been seen in testing, not in the 'real world'), we published the details in our Specification Updates document and left it up to the PC and motherboard makers to decide how they want to update their customers.
This being said - the Core 2 products are amongst the most solid and reliable - something that is reflected in the posts in this forum.
PS: If you want to update you PC, you can use either the Windows patch, or a BIOS update for your motherboard, either one will do the trick, you do not need to do both. If you use a recent version of Linux, you likely don't need to do anything at all.