One of my team got a new MBP in December. He turned it on yesterday and the hard drive isn't recognized and the machine refuses to boot. The Apple store can't do anything but exchange it, there's no way to get to the disk short of taking it to a data recovery shop, which is a dicey proposition at best. I haven't seen many reports of this particular problem elsewhere, but I've had a feeling that apple's quality has been falling, and this is yet another point of anecdata. I think he'll return it and get a Thinkpad, and go full Linux. The MBPs are sexy, but, imho, the price:value ratio has tipped.
Sometimes this behavior is just flaky boot sectors. Try Target Disk Mode [1] to see if the unit's drive can be mounted on another Mac. If you can mount, then perform an immediate SuperDuper! backup before attempting any other recovery, of course.
The thumb, in this scale metaphor, is requiring an Apple computer to create software for the iPhone. From what I've seen, there is little to correct this. Even remoting into a Mac Mini won't help, it just makes things harder. So if you need to tap that particular segment, you have to have an Apple computer, and it will probably be a MBP due to convenience.
