"I made an assumption, was wrong and am annoyed" is a fair summary actually. I'll hold my hands up and say I wasn't particularly bothered about receiving the beta invite so I didn't delve into the FAQ after I got my invite, but I was aware of some form of wipe and some form of refund.
I wasn't so naive to expect an actual real money refund back to my card for the money I spent, but I'm pretty familiar with Blizzard and their products and know they give you a 'balance' on your main battle.net account, so just assumed the spent money would be refunded there and I could use it to pay for WoW subscriptions or something if I didn't want to buy back into Hearthstone.
Like I said in my post, it was a minor issue and I was only mildly annoyed, but I felt like it was an arbitrary decision on Blizzard's part as they could just have easily refunded it to my battle.net account as converted it to gold on my Hearthstone account.
Talking about the game in general: garriec's reaction to me pretty much sums up Hearthstone. Around the time I got my invite, he seemed super excited about wanting to get a beta invite to play, to the point where be messaged me through here to see if there was a chance he could use my account. A few weeks later he seems to have gotten a key, played it, and lost interest in it pretty quickly. That seems to have been how a lot of people have gone with it.
)
), then won my first game in matchmaking.