My 360 came home yesterday. Inside the package was the console, a 1-month Xbox Live Gold membership card, and a letter explaining that to accelerate my repair, they had sent me a different console. I forget the exact wording now, but I think it’s refurbished, not new. As an apology, the letter explained they had included the membership card, which I’ll probably end up giving to one of my brothers once Halo 3 comes out. I plugged everything in, and reconnected my hard drive, and it seems to be working fine.

I read online that some people have problems with downloadable content they already purchased not working, and I haven’t really had a chance to test that yet. I did notice that the new tileset I downloaded for Catan wasn’t working. I’m assuming that I’ll have to re-download some stuff, but I won’t have to pay for it again.

Update: I did a little digging based on Urn’s comment, and found the following:

To clarify for people who still don’t seem to understand, when you pay for and download a game for the first time, it’s keyed to the console ID. This means the console can play it in full mode forever, OR it will run in full mode under your ID on other consoles. When you replace your 360 due to upgrade or failure, you’re no longer using the system your download was keyed to, so you get treated as a legitimate user on someone else’s system – but only if you’re signed in to Live so it can verify that.
– from a discussion thread on Kotaku

That’s super lame, but Urn says they’re working on a fix, so hopefully it’ll get better at some point.

The good news is that since it was under warranty, the repair was entirely free, including the shipping. I know people are upset about the fact that 360s are failing in the first place, but I think it’s just unrealistic to expect a new product to work flawlessly. My 360 lasted for nearly a year, and when it broke Microsoft fixed it for free. That’s a better deal than I ever got from Apple when my laptop’s motherboard died – twice.