Well, the replacement has just arrived.
Not even opened it yet... out of interest, I asked the courier "do you get many of these?"
"Oh yeah, hundreds, we get them every day"
I suppose in fairness, a courier whos job it is to collect faulty consoles IS going to see a lot of them, but still!
Right, time to get this unpacked, and I hope to God it doesn't have noisy fans!
Vin.
EDIT: Just plugged it in as is. Firmware is version 2.5 something, so doesn't seem to have been used for a while. The top seems new, and the memory card cover, and buttons were covered by thin film. Looks like new for the most part, except for some scratches on the underside. Just updating the firmware, and then I'll swap HDDs over and get on with it properly.
EDIT: OK, as the customer services guy said, when I popped my HDD back in there, it told me I had to format it, so did that, and am now restoring my backup from my USB HDD. Once again, it told me that because the backup was made on a different PS3 system, that some files would not be available. I guess I'll have to wait and find out what those are. Hopefully all my PSN games and save games are intact, but I guess it's those that it's talking about. Anyway, no point in speculating, I'll find out in 18 mins....
EDIT: Bah! Restore complete. Then it rebuilt the file system. Then.... damn, unlike when you restore to your own PS3, there are NO game installs, either from blurays, or PSN Store, so these will all have to be downloaded again, not so much fun when you're on a cap... but never mind I suppose. There ARE definitely some save games missing too, notably, Resident Evil 5, as I'd feared. All it's restored is savegames, music, photos and videos, and themes. Damn, no gamedata at all. Still, not the end of the world, that can be reinstalled and downloaded. Just an inconvenience. A shame, considering it was all backed up. Anyway, just posting all this, so anybody else in the same situation knows what to expect.
(and interestingly, as I go to try to sign into my PSN account, I notice my previously added words are in the predicted text box, after the backup)
So far I seem to have lost RE5 savegame, so no unlimited magnum for me

and Killzone 2 isn't there, nor either of my NFS games, and possibly more.