Macbook Pro fails on startup after drive format and OSX reinstall

Hi all,
     I have a 2012 15'' Retina Macbook Pro - pretty new, so it surprises me I'm having this issue.
     The problem was pretty sudden - one day upon startup, I would be immediately told that Finder has closed unexpectedly. From this point on, little functionality remained. Sometimes I could launch a program, rarely would it respond to any input. Launchpad was molasses - I watched my individual apps drawn on the screen one at a time each time it launched. Pressing restart on my keyboard brought up the restart menu but making a selection closed the menu without restart. The only way to shut it off is to hold the power button and do a hard restart.
     I've now formatted the entire partition from my recovery partition on startup and done a fresh install of OSX (Mountain Lion I believe). Even without restoring my data from a backup I encounter the same issues.
     This screams hardware to me, but for the baffling fact that my Windows partition is running just fine - I'm using it right now. I'm not sure where to turn - if it is hardware, is there a way to contact Apple without paying them money? Certainly a defect of this nature warrants replacement from Apple if there's no other solution, correct? I appreciate any advice and expertise.
All the best,
Hertafeld

Actually just to note - one of the people I did manage to find on a forum having the same issue was running OS X as a virtual machine, which would suggest that it’s a software fault - is it possible my Install DVD could have become corrupted somehow or an update in the past year has made some incompatibility between it and my computer’s hardware? If so is there a way of downloading a Snow Leopard ISO image from Apple to try burning and installing from that?
I found this topic: https://discussions.apple.com/message/12459943#12459943 where someone manages to get around the issue by using a different install disc, though I obviously only have the one that came with my Macbook…… halp!

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Macbook Pro fails on startup after drive format and OSX reinstall

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