Migration Assistant overwrote my life - can I get it back?

Hi folks
This experience constitutes my first real Mac burn, and I'm not going to lie, it hurts.
Yesterday I used Migration Assistant to move from my Mac Pro to my new MacBook Pro.  I had already been using the MacBook Pro, and had gotten my media life up and running on it with 300+ gigs of music and about 50 gigs of photos.  My research on this forum before doing the migrate suggested that nothing would be overwritten.
Instead, everything associated with the user account I'd been slowly building anew on the MacBook Pro was overwritten with whatever was in my old Mac Pro.  All I wanted was for the files, applications, and application settings to be added to my new system, not to overwrite it completely.
Does anyone know if I can reverse this process.  I admit to foolishly not backing up the MacBook before migrating - I have always backed up my content manually, so have never used Time Machine to backup my actual system.  I have backups of everything that was overwritten, but I had intentionally removed it from the Mac Pro in order to start afresh on the MacBook.  Will I need to start afresh again, or can I somehow reclaim everything from the MacBook user account that was overwritten.
In addition, the two computers had the same name, so when I was asked to rename one I chose to rename the old system with the suffix "crap" thinking I would have no further use for it, because I assumed the MacBook I was migrating to would never be overwritten.  Instead, I'm now stuck with a crappy name. I would like to change it.
Any help with this mess would be great.
I have to say that my experience with Migration Assistant was wretched. It took me a day to get the two computers actually communicating in order to do the migrate.  The estimates of time to completion were preposterously off - it took over an hour to complete the last "less than a minute".  And the purpose and actions of the program were very poorly indicated.  I did not just jump into this, but spent hours reading up, only to wreak utter havoc on my digital life.
A sad day in my life with Mac.

Sorry to hear about the mess - I had a similar experience last year. The problem with MA is that you have already established an account, etc, etc - so you wind up with overwritten or - in my case - duplicate accounts and/or folders, messed up permissions, and the list goes on.
However, Setup Assistant, which is only offered once - right after the welcome screen when you first boot up the new Mac - will simply port over everything and should work just fine (althought they are both essentially the same procedure, the huge difference is that if you use SA, you don't have anything set up on the new Mac yet).
So, the easiest would be (as long as you still have everything on your old Mac): insert install disk on the new Mac, after selecting language, to to Utilities at top, choose Disk Utility, and erase your hard drive. Once done, let Installer start and have a firewire cable ready. After the welcome screen, follow the on screen instructions for Setup Assistant and you should be fine.

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