On the bright side of things... you _might_ get one w/ HDMI. Just remember to take your disk out of the system (and I don't think you need to send the HDD back either).
Do they still have the three-year warranty for the RRoD on new systems? I'm about to get a 360, and I've heard the newer ones are more reliable, but still.
I believe the warranty is the same across the board, 1 year on general stuff, 3 years on the RRoD. I just saw that the new 65nm GPU's (i.e. Jasper) were hitting stores.