I've had two MSI boards in the past and although none died within a year both did go around the 3-5 year point. On top of that I found them fairly finicky boards with lots of weird quirks to them. On the other hand they were cheap and usually the first to the market with the chipsets I was waiting for.
One was a Socket A Via chipset with the 266MHz FSB and the other was a Socket 754 with the nForce3-250GB chipset.
The last two systems I've built have had Gigabyte boards and I seem to like them more. Not as flashy, not quite as many features (usually ones I don't care about anyways like being able to OC in the OS) but cheap and stable.
As for the Lucid HYDRA talk we've had a thread here about it and it already looks like nVidia is pulling the high school stuff out.