The case of the unbootable Macbook Air running Lion

I upgraded to Lion without issue on release day. This is a previous gen Macbook Air with all options including upgraded processor that ran Snow Leopard with no issues. It's literally a month and a half old.
Last night I closed the lid just as the battery was about to die; this morning, I had some trouble waking it up and connecting it to my monitor. A short time later I unplugged it and relocated to a coffee shop to work, and I couldn't get it to boot past the gray screen with the spinner. After several restarts and a bit of futzing around I booted into the Recovery partition and ran Disk Utility. Basically...
1) Disk Utility can't fix the issue, and tells me to back up my drive, format and reinstall.
2) I went to an Apple Store where the suggested solution was just to replace the drive. I let them order the part, but kept the machine to try and do some diagnostics of my own (since they really didn't do any).
3) I can see my boot partition from in the Terminal in the recovery partition, but trying to recover files onto an external drive is a no go. I get messages about not being able to copy "extended attributes" and the copies never finish successfully.
Basically I'm up a creek. I have some backups but hadn't had a chance to do one this morning before all this went down. I'm also having issues getting the Lion installer to even run. All in all, this is a mess. There must be some way to fix what's wrong with the disk but I have no idea how. Not having an optical drive makes booting into Disk Warrior a challenge.
I'm hoping someone else out there has had a similar issue with Lion and was able to resolve it. Right now, my pet theory is that my MBA had some issues as it was writing the contents of RAM to disk and it now has a corrupted boot record. There are inconsistencies on the boot volume but of course Disk Utility can't fix them. Any help is much appreciated!

Hi
I'm very sure that if bought the MBA from Apple oran Apple Retailer you would get pretty quick satisfaction.  I know both my lcal Apple Retailer and the downtown Apple store would provide me a new MBA right away.
I'd go back to teh folks that sold it to you as a starter.

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