Dunno what you guys are doing wrong with your pets. I'm currently level 59 in Hell A3 (inb4INFERNOONLYOMG) with a boomdog spec and kicking some serious ass.
Here's my spec:
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculato...VjT!ZWd!ZccZbc
Stats:
http://i45.tinypic.com/xemc2.jpg
My dogs stay up pretty well. Sure, they die here and there, but that's what the sac is for.
They start dropping, you sac and resummon. Here's the thing. Each one of my dogs currently explodes for 40k crits (obviously less non-crits, but still ridiculously hard). If I sac four dogs, it's usually at least 100k damage. And that's aaaaaall AoE damage. 100k AoE. Ridiculous. And not only that, I can immediately resummon and sac again for another 100k AoE. 200k AoE damage + an entire mana pool of corpse explosions (somewhere around 80k, again AoE) can kill blue and yellow packs in about 8 seconds. It kills them so fast I don't even get touched. And with my current stats, the big guy never dies in anything other than AoE spells from elites, and rarely then. If he does happen to, I can immediately resummon him because the CD is always available. His slam hits for around 12k noncrits. It's amazing.
All of this is paired with the fantastic roll the bones firebomb damage. Awesome AoE lob attack. I hit 5-9k noncrits and 10-15k crits that bounce three times in an AoE. I am literally shredding everything I come near, and my pets are very hardy and do sick damage. The only tiny downside is no mana regen, but the rest of your damage is so good that you just end up saving corpse explosions as burst DPS to get down elites. Pets are good; you just have to know how to gear/spec.
Haven't tried inferno yet, of course. I don't know yet whether I'll be able to keep this spec or if I'll have to switch. Time will tell.
Edit: Just killed two yellow packs that spawned together and only died once at the beginning when I wasn't ready. After I respawned I double sacked + a couple next of kin procs, instakilled ALL of both yellow's minions, and killed the two yellows together a couple seconds later.