Many classical information processing devices are less than 100% reliable. Wifi (or old school dialup) will drop a non-trivial number of packets. RAM chips have some non-zero amount of unreliability, but in most cases we don't notice [1]. Computer processors in space will similarly fail due to cosmic ray bombardment. In all cases, you mitigate such problems by adding redundancy or error correction.
Quantum computer hardware is similarly very error-prone, and it is unlikely that we will ever build quantum hardware which will have ignorable levels of error. However, people have developed many techniques, often much more sophisticated that in the classical domain, for handling the fragility of quantum hardware. I am not familiar with the details of recent improvements in qiskit, but they are referring to improvements in specific "error mitigation" techniques implemented within qiskit. These techniques will be used in tandem with others methods like error correction to create quantum computers that give you answers with close to but less than 100% chance of success.
As you say, in these cases, you will repeat your simulation a few times and take a majority vote.
Quantum computer hardware is similarly very error-prone, and it is unlikely that we will ever build quantum hardware which will have ignorable levels of error. However, people have developed many techniques, often much more sophisticated that in the classical domain, for handling the fragility of quantum hardware. I am not familiar with the details of recent improvements in qiskit, but they are referring to improvements in specific "error mitigation" techniques implemented within qiskit. These techniques will be used in tandem with others methods like error correction to create quantum computers that give you answers with close to but less than 100% chance of success.
As you say, in these cases, you will repeat your simulation a few times and take a majority vote.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECC_memory