Like most I played Fallout New Vegas close to release date and loved it. But to be frank, I would only tolerate bugs to a certain point. Being on PC, there tend to be workarounds, official/unofficial patches, fixes, console commands. Things to do before the game becomes truly broke, unplayable, or you lose your save progress. New Vegas had a lot of things to fix that.
However, of course there have been times where bugs made me put the game down for a good while, and some forever. All in all I'd prefer a good but buggy game tho, in a heartbeat.