Re:Just FUD? (Score 3, Informative)

Sure, the cards might have been resold, but they are branded cisco items bearing the entire cisco interface and functionality - somehow I doubt outright fake chipsets and devices like this can be produced by anyone other than cisco themselves.

Whether or not this is what happened in this particular case, I don't know. But in general, the issue is not that someone has taken the time to reverse-engineer a complete product and produce it again from the ground up. The "fake" hardware likely comes from any combination of several places:

• Chip vendors often have huge inventories of chips that failed testing, but are otherwise marginally functional. Some of these chips could be branded and sold by an unscrupulous factory (hehe, that sounds funny :-) as legitimate parts. Or more likely, they can be sold to the guy in the next point:
• Factories in 3rd-world or offshore countries (cheap labour) can and do produce legitimate hardware items for some of the big-name companies, of which Cisco is one. That is, they produce the legit hardware by day. After hours, or for a portion of the day, they can use the exact same process, exact same tooling, etc. to produce the knock-offs. These are then distributed through some other means.
• Finally, the contract manufacturers (factories in the above point) will have many products that failed QA, but a marginally functional. These also can get sold as counterfeit gear. So the reverse-engineering is not so much the issue (although I am sure there is some degree of that). But as another poster mentioned, if you have the expertise to completely reverse-engineer something and reproduce it, you should go into business yourself selling a competing product that is much cheaper:-)