OnceUponAnApple

Not 100% true.

The concept of surprise and delight in the Genius Bar is a little more calculated than "empathetic outreach."

When a device had an issue that was not related to, say, the physical damage present, or if there existed a loophole we could jump through to go above and beyond, we would, yes, but generally with with our own judgement, and our job is to do our job: repair devices at the quoted cost. "Instances," against our performance was a measure of our quality of work, as in mistakes made, so we still operated in the framework of completing repairs that needed to be taken care of. I never had an "instance."

The other component of "surprise and delight" is generally attributed to the Tech Expert or Genius, or contracted off-site repair (those devices being sent out go to Pegatron, not Apple) performing the physical repair and making a mistake while doing it. This could happen is they strip a screw, bend a ribbon cable, or damage the device themselves while in their possession. 

All of these were presented as a surprise in exchange for delight, to generate customer loyalty. The Genius Bar has amazing days, and awful ones. The customers always dictate how that occurs. There is indeed a lot of psychological manipulation in order to perform well, and us employees had the job to outsmart, outthink, and maintain dominance in all interactions. Empathy is the strongest weapon Apple has in their arsenal. It WORKS.

In multiple years, I've never seen a manager just "give out," a device. The only "major," delight I've seen was when I had a customer bring in a 2011 15" MBP with a video card issue under a repair program, but he had a very rare 1TB SSD for that model where internally the LB didn't exist anymore, so our only option was to replace the device with a "similarly equipped, in-stock device:" a new i9 32GB/1TB 15" MBP to match the drive size. There is, and always will be a reason, but the customer doesn't know about it, mainly because they never read the repair notes. All they know is how they feel, and that's how Apple snares loyalty.