iOS 7.0.4 woes, continued

Well, it's been about a week since I last posted on my iPad woes. During that time, I've scoured the Internet and the Apple forums (fora?) looking for answers. What I've discovered is that about 1-2% of iOS devices are experiencing the problem I'm having. That might not sound like very many, but it works out to between 500,000 and 1,000,000 devices. Yep, the number of zeroes is correct. Up to a million devices!

I read here that you could get it to kickstart if you held the home and power buttons down for up to 15 minutes! I had nothing to lose, so I figured I'd try it. My fingers would slip off one of the buttons after about 10 minutes. Finally—I'm a bit slow sometimes!—I decided to take the iPad out of its case. Now I could actually hold the power button down without destroying my finger : )

I held it down for 20 minutes. No success : (

I decided to try Apple Support. I set up a chat session last night and was online with them for over 2 hours. The initial contact was somebody who called himself Micheal [sic]. I suspect he was in India; he went through the script, but I had already done everything there. We got disconnected, so I tried again and this time I got someone calling himself Mercedes. Again, I suspect India‐definitely not a native English speaker. After about an hour of more of the same, he told me it was a hardware issue and that I would have to pay to have it fixed.

NOT! I told him it was a software issue. I never had an issue until iOS 7. He told me to hang on for a minute. He transferred me to someone else. This person called himself Colsen and was very pleasant—I found out later in the conversation that he is based in Atlanta. He reviewed the case, asked me to resend a couple of screenshots and photos I had already uploaded but didn't make the transfer. We tried various things for about 30 minutes before he came to the conclusion that it needed to be reset by an Apple tech.

He asked if I could get to an Apple store. I told him I was about 5 hours from the nearest one : (

Looks like sending it in is the only option...so I'm waiting for the labels and packaging to come from Apple. The bright side: They pay the freight. And it doesn't look like I'm going to have to pay anything—which is the way it should be. It was their software screw-up that has "bricked" it...

By the way, Apple, if you happen upon this post...I suspect the problem is in a code change in the software power off sequence. Every time the software tries to reboot the iPad, it locks. If I'm not connected to a power source (either via USB to the MacBook, or via the power adapter), whenever the software turns the screen off, it locks. Anytime an iOS update tries to reboot (since iOS 7.0), it locks. Please fix it! You have about a million devices that are worthless until you do...

Update:
I just spent 33 minutes on the phone with 2 different people at Apple. They are going to repair/replace it free. They didn't even ask for the credit card information. Of course, I had to keep reiterating that it was a software issue, not a hardware one. But, hey, it looks like I'm going to get a working iPad again soon...