My problem with all of these arguments is that the size is meaningless anyway. Who goes to the store with a laundry list of all the data they expect to have and buy a hard drive based on that? No one. You go to the store and buy the biggest one you can afford. Nor do you decide how many windows you're going to have on your screen at once and decide how big your monitor needs to be to support them.

Is it wrong that they use GB and inches to mean things other than what they really mean? Yeah, sure. But, in the end, as long as they're consistent, who cares? Of course, nothing but a lawsuit will fix it. I can't imagine that Seagate and Hitachi will release hard drives of the same size, only to have Seagate mark it with a smaller number. Heck, the people who care have made up new terms for the binary-based units, rather than try to (supposedly) reclaim the original terms. In addition, I'm pretty sure that "giga" means "billion" in every other application. And even amongst computer professionals, you almost always have to qualify terms like that in the rare instance when precise measurements are needed.