I also had the vertical scan lines and had it swapped out. It's hard to see unless you move your eyes around the screen (playing a game, watching a video).
Use the attached test image and set it as your home screen. It's just alternating black/white lines of 1 pixel width. It will make the "shadowy" area near the dock flicker like crazy. You can show this to the Genius. It's very obvious. While I was waiting for my appointment I loaded it on a display phone for comparison (which looked perfect), but she said she didn't even need to look, it's that bad.
Don't accept this as being normal. It's definitely a hardware issue.
By the way, the Genius visually inspected the condition of the white box phone before activating it, and let me as well. She said a lot of people had been doing exchanges due to out-of-box damage.