Pre-LED MBP issue: reboot loop w/checkerboard-like display

Has anyone else experienced anything like this with their MBP?

I woke my MBP from sleep as I went to do something on it and I found a checkerboard-like (or interlacing) pattern displayed across the screen. That is, I could see bits and pieces of Firefox, the desktop, the dock, etc. in little rectangles across the screen with the bits and pieces scattered all over the place (like puzzle pieces strewn everywhere). I wasn't entirely surprised as I had seen a friend of mine have a similar problem when waking his MBP from sleep. I didn't have time to deal with a restart, so I went to my gf's Windoze machine (perhaps what follows is my MBP taking revenge for going off when times got tough and cheating on it with a *gasp* PC!!???).

So, when I returned to my machine later on, it sounded like it was rebooting itself as I walked in the room. Then about 15-20 seconds later, it did the same thing. When I opened it up, the same checkerboard pattern appeared as it started to reboot, then it went to a completely blue screen, and finally went black (as in turned-off black). After that, it started this same process over again and stayed stuck in that loop until I held down the power button to turn it completely off.

I called Apple (still under 90-day Apple Care since I got the machine in April) and did all of the troubleshooting tasks that they talked me through. It is apparently a hardware issue, as I feared, and I will have to send it off to have it repaired. (At least is sending the pre-paid box for me to ship it to them).

Please let me know if you've had/heard of anything like this and what the problem turned out to be.

Thanks!!!
(an extremely sad) jdo

p.s. Curious timing for this problem to appear...I suppose I should have waited till June.