The problem is that the clones look identical to the original, and claim to be the original, so the customer has no idea he is buying a clone. Firmware updates don't work on clones, and may leave the clone bricked, although that's not the intention. So they are trying to figure all this out with respect to new products. The irony is that this is a Chinese company. I guess the counterfeiters don't discriminate based on nationality.
I understand your point, and I guess it would all depend on a few factors.
Unless we are talking about a very low-cost product (even the genuine one), the customer usually knows, or at least should reasonably know, that they are buying a clone. Clones are usually much cheaper - that's the whole point. Now if some clones are sold at prices in the same ballpark as the genuine product, this is another problem: this is just plain rip-off, and the customer would be entitled to get back at the reseller. But it's pretty rare, unless you like buying from very suspect sources. Usually the clones are way cheaper, and a moderately-educated customer should figure out this can't be a genuine product, and if in doubt, testimonies are usually not hard to find before you decide to buy.
If a customer is silly enough to believe they can actually buy a genuine product for 10 times less than the market price, they are living in a fairy world. And if on the other hand, they understand they are buying a clone and still think they will get full support and equivalent quality - again they are fooling themselves. So I personally think this is the customer's responsibility, and in some cases, the reseller's (if they really advertise some product as a genuine one and sells it at equivalent prices). One of the two is not being honest IMO.
Now for very low-cost products, you may not notice the difference, and you can get fooled easily - but it won't matter much, it's cheap.
This is a consideration for end-products. For semi-finished products or components, this is a slightly different story. The responsibility shifts from the customer (or reseller) to the manufacturer using said components. Let's take the FTDI case. A few manufacturers may have bought what they thought were genuine parts, and they weren't. But that's their responsibility. If you care for your business, selecting reputable suppliers is a big part of the story. If you don't, well, you know what to expect. And for the huge majority of manufacturers that were fully aware they were using cloned FTDI chips in their products to lower costs, this is all the more their responsibility: if anything goes wrong, they should fully refund their customers. Plain and simple. In this FTDI case, you may or may not agree with FTDI's move (bricking fake chips) which admittedly was pretty inept, but that doesn't change the fact that the full responsibility lies on the manufacturers' heads.
Anyway, just my opinion.
But just to get back to this "not-aware customers" thing: again apart from plain and obvious rip-off, customers should really get educated regarding their consuming habits in general, especially in this now completely world-wide market. Some people are gullible enough to think that they can get products that are overpriced in the western world, at barely manufacturing costs just because the reseller is from China. This is very rarely the case. Most of those products are either clones, or in some cases, indeed genuine products coming from the plants that manufacture them, but just the ones that got rejected at QC control, so they may present various issues, including being DOA.