Yes, really, people can not put too much trust in IC resistors, to think an inductor is going to have an exact value is just asking for trouble (but probably not 50% off though)
The little I know about RF circuits and inductors is that within 10% is usually fine. Off by 30% though means your RF circuit isn't centered anymore. With the IC mentioned the RF receive path was hosed. The guy that did the inductor design also had the issue that a simulation took about 8 hours.
In their case once they knew how far off the inductors were with the process being used they were able to adjust the target inductance and then do a re-layout (couple of 80 hours weeks, and another full set of masks, no problem). I think part of the problem was that for the previous geometry and design frequency 1GHZ they were using their tool gave good results. New geometry and 2.4GHZ and it was wrong. No way to test either.
