[saurik]

FWIW, I am perfectly willing to believe that the various complaints that came up among my friend group were all weirdly-correlated one-offs (like, maybe we are all likely to have done certain stupid things with our tablets in the same way), and that tiziano88 is wrong about the cable.

That said, I've found some other people talking about similar issues.

http://forums.androidcentral.com/google-nexus-7-tablet-acces...

Apparently, in their version of the manual (maybe it was changed after Google I/O) there is even a statement about the cable: "use the charging unit and micro USB cable that come with your Nexus 7; other charging units and USB cables may charge more slowly or not at all".

http://i595.photobucket.com/albums/tt35/StereoMike7/86ee9ea1...

I then maintain that if this is true, they should have provided a bright blue cable that said "Nexus" on it, so I'd always be able to know "ok, that's the cable that came with my Nexus 7 that I should be using when I charge it", as otherwise you end up with this horrible set of folklore surrounding how the charging sucks (as, seriously: how many people read or pay heed to the fine print warnings in the manual? ;P).