I normally let my dealer do the first service on all my bikes. I figure if it has a manufacturing defect it should show up in the first 1000 miles. Just takes one argument off the table if the bike has a major problem.
That's the main reason I always let a dealer do the first service. If something fails within the warranty period,
they're not gonna be able to weasel out of things by saying that the first service was improper.
That said, there are good dealers and bad dealers. I won't use one of the dealers in my area for service anymore
because I discovered they have charged me for things that they didn't do. There's a GREAT independent repair
shop about 30 minutes in the other direction, but he's almost always booked solid. He's honest and competitively
priced.
I bought a Toyota Tundra a few years ago, and had some tire wear on the outside edges of the front tires. I got
it aligned at an independent shop, and sure enough the toe-in was WAY out. Apparently, that's one of the things
that is supposed to be checked pre-delivery at the dealer. It virtually never is, because that would take actual time and effort
to check! Just one example of the many shortcuts dealers take all the time.
If you take your bike with a shim-under-bucket valve adjustment setup in to have them checked, and you're
not given the details of how many were adjusted and why, you can bet your last dollar that they didn't adjust anything -
and maybe didn't even check. Easy profit for the dealer.
OTOH, a dealer that charges you a fair price for your initial checkup and actually does it, is a dealer that you really oughta patronize.
-Stretch