The guy I was talking to said he was not the first owner of the bike, so the previous owner of his bike could have failed to maintain the bike. He had new bearings installed (top and bottom), and there has been no issues with his bike since.
My bike has had no problems, yet. But if it was to start acting strange, I'd haul it into my LBS pronto to make sure something wasn't going to cause damage.
I was just worried that integrated headsets are cheap the point where I should think about replacing it with a non-integrated one